A Life Between Heaven and Earth
by Abyssal1
Summary: Sometimes all the things you know can be challenged by the one thing you don't. Sometimes love isn't easy to explain - not when a universe of differences exist between you. WARNINGS: explicit sex, angst. HARD M - MATURE READERS ONLY PLEASE.
1. Chapter 1

* * *

**_(A/N: I have taken some creative liberties with the timeline here. Please forgive all character and canon deviations in order to tell you a story! For this purpose the fluid has been recovered, but needs several months more "cooking" due to much of it being sprayed in Wikus' face. Wikus is in hiding in D9, waiting for the fluid to be ready so that they can ascend to the ship... but his relationship with Christopher has become complex, and the change in his body moves inexorably on.)_**

* * *

_..._

_..._

_..._

_He has fallen, Wikus thinks, like the angels have fallen, and now he couples with demons in Hell._

_The unforgiving sun beats down on the galvanized iron of he shack, cooking him and the creature between his legs, the one working over his body in mute concentration. The table's wood warps and creaks. It's not built for the pressure of thirty years and their combined weight._

_To much sensory information. Too much deep, primordial disgust. *I'm fucking a creature. A fucking creature has his *thing* inside me.*_

_He can hear Christopher's exoskeletal plates sliding against each other like dry leaves in a drought. The rough shell of his jutting hips chafe the inside of Wikus' pale thighs. The segments of Christopher's narrow alien belly remind him of a centipede's back. The brush of primary mandibles on his shoulder, the one suppurating with the Change, is repulsive to him._

_But he forces himself to look at what is being done to him, what he's become. The grimy shirt hangs off his arms, but other than that he's naked. His erect penis is only a residual human reaction to the soup of hormones flooding through his body. It knocks against Christopher's abdomen, sending sinful human aftershocks chasing the alien sensations._

_He forces himself to look as Christopher's part, his *organ* his *penis*, his *whatever-the-fuck* stabs into the cloaca that has formed where his anus used to be._

_At least Prawns don't stink beyond mown grass. That would be too much. As it is, he can go no lower._

_Christopher on the other hand has his eyes mashed shut. He seems to be on autopilot each time they come together like this. His breath gushes out of him with each thrust. His maxillae are held stiffly against the side of his face. Perhaps he hates this even more than Wikus does, but once started, there is no point in which they can stop._

_To combat his looming panic, Wikus yells. He shouts every time Christopher's prehensile organ unfolds itself within him, the rasp of it against his new, tender prawn-skin, the stinging flick of the end in a body still too human to process what is going on. He shouts curses in every language he knows, and some in no language. He shrieks that this is all Christopher's fault, accuses him of everything that has ever gone wrong in his life._

_He never made so much noise with Tania. "You're so quiet," she used to say. "I can't tell when you've come."_

_Oh Tania. His Angel. He tries to imagine her face, and all he can remember is blonde hair and a veil. Beautiful. Now he's reduced to this - ugliness._

_Christopher's expelled breath begins to speed up in a staccato pattern, and his clicks are analogous to "oh... oh... oh..."_

_He's fucking a creature._

_Wikus hears his own approaching climax, his shouts of anger and despair and brutal pleasure. He wants to be punished for being weak, for being clumsy, stupid, the kind of man people laughed at in corridors, made fun of at parties, the little comments, "He's such a nothing little man, isn't he? Tania only married him because she pitied him. How long will it last...?"_

_"Fucking creature, harder, you fuck..."_

_His fingers - human and alien - dig into the rotting plank of the table until they bleed. He's straining for orgasm and fearing it at the same time. Christopher's almost on top of him now, his insect belly rasps the soft skin of Wikus' abdomen. His arms are drawn close. Wikus fears that Christopher will try to embrace him. He doesn't want intimacy. He doesn't want to cross that line. He prepares to push Christopher away once they're done._

_"Fuck off," he'll say after they finish. "Get the fuck away from me."_

_He'll say this even though he initiated intercourse. He'll say it because he cannot bear to have anyone witness his degradation afterwards. Christopher will leave. Sometimes Wikus will cry. Weak._

_Somewhere in the corner of his vision the door swings open, someone attracted by all the noise they're making._

_He sees blue eyes gone wide in anxiety. He sees himself as the kid prawn would se him, a pornographic tableaux no child should see, a pathetic excuse for a human splayed out on the table, like an experiment in degrading acts._

_The words come out of his mouth before he can stop them._

_"Oh shit, the fooking kid..."_

_Christopher's eyes flash open in alarm. He pulls out too quickly, barbs against skin and the pain is intense, and real. Wikus groans and spasm's into a foetal position._

_"Ah Jesus..."_

_Christopher has gone, calling for his child. The squalid shack is too hot. He's naked on a table, bleeding like a medical experiment._

_He is in Hell._

* * *

After the unfortunate incident of the afternoon, Christopher did not return

Panting in the heat, Wikus rolled off the table and tried to find the rest of his clothes. He had halfway forgotten where he'd discarded them during those blind, fumbling few seconds between demanding sex from Christopher, his "Come on man, I'm in fooking agony," and Christopher being difficult about it, answering each of Wikus's pleas with a hard-clicked "No."

Or perhaps Christopher had torn the clothes off after he'd relented, seeking access to the spaces of Wikus' body, new and ripe with alien hormones, a terrible distraction to a Prawn isolated by rank and intelligence. The No's always gave way to incoherent clicks of submission, the unfolding of Christopher's *thing*, and the shameful act that followed.

Finally the shack's stifling heat and aimless clutter proved too much for Wikus. He gave up looking for the rags and stumbled outside, naked as a baby.

Behind Christopher's shack, someone had attached a steel drum to a cunning system of gutters to catch the intermittent rainwater. The water smelt of rust, was halfway on the verge of stagnating. Wikus washed himself down as best he could. The lukewarm water stung the edges of his skin. His insides felt bruised and raw. Christopher hadn't orgasmed, or climaxed or whatever-the-fuck it was Prawns did inside him, so hadn't brought the welcome numbness, the cessation of pain.

Now it was returning, a sick, swelling tide.

A door's slam interrupted Wikus' thoughts.

On the other side of the gutter-sewer path that separated the shacks, a figure shambled out of the dark doorway.

_Fuck!_ He immediately held his washrag to his crotch with his human hand, suddenly ashamed of his nakedness in front of a woman.

Or a girl, more accurately. Teetering on ill-fitting garbage-collection high heels, she made her uneven way across the ditch towards the water-drum. The heels sunk into the mud.

As she approached, Wikus saw how dull her dark eyes were, her lifeless expression. She might have been pretty once. Now she was one of the prostitutes that populated the stinking edges of the slum. The spectre of interspecies sex was a taboo subject in all levels of society. Not so long ago he would have crossed the road not to be near her.

"Oh, I was just... just finishing up," he stammered.

She ignored his protests, snatched the washrag out of Wikus' hand. With one bored, casual movement she pulled off her dress.

_Ah the fuck._ The kid was no older than Samantha, his niece. Less than fourteen if she was a day, breasts no more than bumps on her chest. She didn't even have hair between her legs. A scar on her forearm marked her as one of Mbube's.

The water made the girl's dark skin glisten in the sunlight. Thankfully, he was not aroused, just startled by the utter humanness of a person who did not have tentacles or antennae.

As if the water had brought her back to life she gave Wikus a hard stare. He was trying to hide himself behind the drum, waiting for a quick getaway.

"You're the InDuna's white man?" she demanded. Her accent was unexpected, like a private-school girl's. But newer layers of street-dialect were worn over the top, both disguise and protection.

"No, I'm just staying with him," stuttered Wikus, trying not to look any lower than her prominent collarbones. There was no hiding what she thought he was. Like her. Here to service the creatures.

"You fuck him. I hear you screaming in the shack there."

To add insult, she pointed at his thigh where his cloaca had expelled the last evidence of their fornication, a bloodied, black smear.

"Ah fook, I mean, sorry." He went to rub his leg and stood there, exposed.

"No need to be shamed. I've seen them all. Black ones, white ones, poleepkwa ones."

Wikus didn't know what to say in response. He was a vain, selfish man if he could only cry about his life. His life might have been bad, but so was hers. He's come to Christopher by choice. Mbube sold her to the Prawns for sex.

"Are you and the InDuna fighting?"

"Why do you call him that?"

"That's what the others say he is. Big boss poleepkwa." She pointed at the scrawl on the side of Christopher's shack. He'd not really ever noticed it but for the other gang signs. InDuna.

"So, are you fighting?"

"No!"

"Will he give you to someone else now?"

"No! Listen - uh - what's your name…?"

"Ntozake."

"Ntozake, look, I'm not here because I have to be. I can leave whenever I want," he lied. "I'm not a..." He waved his human hand at her, and her expression hardened, which made him even more awkward.

"You want clothes?"

"Oh, um...what?"

She gave him a look that teenagers always give adults who are stupid. For a second she could have been a schoolgirl trying to explain something obvious to him, such as asking a naked man if he wanted clothes.

"The poleepkwa in there, he collects clothes. Swenks around like a human. Likes to think he's the big man with a human woman."

"I'm sorry, I know it must be bad for you."

She held up his little finger. "I prefer it. All poleepkwa only little down there."

Wikus pressed his mouth together, thinking of Christopher being decidedly un-little. "I'll take the clothes."

Ntozake pulled her floral dress back over her head. "I like you, umlungu," she said with a hint of wickedness. "I will dress you well."

* * *

In the cooling evening light, Wikus sat and watched as Christopher tried to explain to his son what they had been doing.

Not so far away a gang of Prawns were incinerating a bin-load of rubbish. Noxious smoke roiled across the surrounding shacks like a hyena nuzzling under a carcass. A pair of stray dogs fought over a dirty scrap of cow-flesh, only to be kicked aside by powerful Prawn foot.

Curious eyes still turned in his direction. Wikus pulled the blanket over his head, wished they could have had some privacy. He remembered all too well the younger sister of his first girlfriend coming upon them by accident. She had immediately told Helen's mother, and Helen - sandy-haired Helen with the dimpled chin and the mock piety - had accused Wikus of forcing himself upon her.

So at fifteen and still a virgin, he'd been taken to the police station and had to recount in excruciating detail his first sexual almost-encounter, about how Helen had been the one to call him to her room, had undressed him and laughed at his flaccid penis. He hadn't even managed to get inside her. (Only later would he understand that she'd never seen a prick that wasn't erect for her and was startled by his un-aroused state. The revelation did not help.)

Now all those feelings were being brought back. The shame of it. The frustration of being interrupted mid-coitus and wondering when it would be appropriate to ask again.

His alien senses picked up Christopher Junior in a state of fretfulness, his little hands wringing.

"Why were you hurting him Father?"

"Little one, I was not hurting him."

"He was crying. You were on top of him, hurting him."

Wikus closed his eyes, and turned his head. How could this be explained to a child?

Christopher trill-clicked gently, "When two adults mate, Little One, they will want to be close, to express in actions their feelings for each other. For humans it is different. Humans will make sounds to express emotions. It is cathartic for him to do this when we are together. They are not pain-sounds."

"No?" C.J. turned and looked to Wikus for conformation.

Wikus shook his head wordlessly. Christopher had demanded his [participation. Made him sit down in front of Chris Junior as if they were some united front.

"One day you will do the same." A pat on C.J.'s head, tender. "You will find your mate and you will know of this feeling."

"Will he yell like the sweetie-man?"

Christopher gave a wry cluster of clicks, his laugh. "A human vocalizes for comfort, to communicate. Your mate with not be so loud."

"I don't think I will want to do that."

"It is done out of *love*."

Wikus frowned and the unfamiliar trill. It sounded like *love*, but with added stresses that denoted something sacred, holy.

"You love him, Father?"

Wikus could see Christopher's shoulders sag. He touched his child's head. "Yes, it is our love-act. Don't be alarmed at his human reaction, as he cannot help it. It is important to them as well."

Where had Christopher learnt such an understanding of humans? Certainly not off him. Wikus gave a cough, to hide his face.

C.J. ran to Wikus' knee, and hugged it with delight, his tiny maxilla quivering in the way they did when emotions ran high. All Wikus could think of was the MNU sociologist who had dismissed prawn pair-bonding and familial relationships as a rare anomaly, a statistical blip so small as to be irrelevant.

Wikus hesitated, then copied Christopher's affectionate gesture with his graceless alien hand, feeling worse than ever. Why did children of all fucking species have to look up at them with such clean and naked hope? He wanted to curl up and die.

"Yeah, why don't you run along mate, I need to talk to your dad."

C.J. hugged him again, then disappeared into the shadows.

Christopher turned away from Wikus. He would not meet Wikus' gaze.

"Chris..."

"I have lied to my child. I promised myself that I would never do this." The garbage-fire chased shadows across his face. "I have broken my promise."

Wikus wanted to say that he was sorry. He wanted this tight feeling in his chest to go away. He wanted not to give a fuck about what a Prawn thought. There were over two million of them, a swarm, a plague. Why should the feelings of one even matter?

"You didn't have to lie. It was fine if you told him the truth about us."

"The truth?" Christopher rose to his full height, his hands bare, hands that could tear his arm off as easily as he tore meat off a dead animal. "Tell him the truth? That I have debased a sacred act so that you can be like that?"

Christopher jabbed a finger to where Ntozake swayed in an glue-fug under Mbube's watchful eyes. She was so doped-up she didn't even know when she was being sold to service or just lolling around like a Queen.

Christopher's clicks were like a butcher's saw snarling against bone. "I will not have my child growing up ruined and hardened by your brutal planet and your barbaric ways! He will not be like me. He will come to know the love-act in joy and pride and respect, know of it in all the ways I have never known it."

That said, Christopher stalked away.

* * *

(TBC)


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

Of two million Poleepkwa refugees, only one in a thousand is smart enough to hold any kind of job.

And every night the two thousand refugees given papers allowing them access to the city will leave the District. They'll leave at dusk, come back in the early house of the morning. They'll work when the humans sleep. Menial work. Cleaning, garbage collecting, guarding.

If only to escape the pollution and oppression of the internment camp, Wikus sometimes came with them, blanket over his head, sometimes running to keep up, because prawns could be shot on sight for loitering and lingering, and shot even faster if it seemed they were running away.

Getting out was tricky. He couldn't just march out the front gates. But cyclone fences are notoriously flimsy, and once out on the streets he was a white man in South Africa. Who was going to stop him?

Sometimes he took the long journey east, detoured past his house. Once or twice he imagined knocking on his door. But only once or twice. He saw a strange car parked out the front, one Saturday night. It stayed there until Sunday afternoon.

Tania was surviving their separation the way he was surviving.

Years from now they would look back on this empty space in their relationship together. It was a time they would think of as part of their test, as husband and wife, for richer for poorer, in sickness and heath and alien transformation.

He would be like a soldier returned from a long and strange war. She would forgive his moods, his silences. They would endure.

But for now, all he could do was watch from afar, as she committed adultery with a slick MNU executive. But she never threw out his clothes, his office. Everything stayed, waiting for his return.

* * *

After the argument with Christopher, Wikus took his bed-roll and his bag and stayed the night in Michael's shack, cursing all prawns who deviated from normal, stupid prawn behaviour.

Wikus only remembered Michael Smith as a lumpy-looking creature who had ended up under a bakkie's wheels, wandering into the middle of a muddy street when in a state of cat-food euphoria.

Michael's shack had not been repopulated yet. Wikus didn't want to move too much further away, even with the few sympathetic NGO tents set up for humans. There would always be those populations who circumstances sent to this lowest sector of life. Life was dangerous so cose to Pleepkwa without protection. He'd seen the markings on the walls around the District, the sigils counting off human deaths.

Besides, he needed time to think.

The cold night seeped in under the gaps in the door along with the smell of burning tires. His hated prawn hand ached like an old, almost forgotten injury. He could hear the a million alien lives moving around him, grinding their pheromones into the very dirt.

"_Tania_," he whispered, missing her like a thorn in his heart. "_Tan__ia. My angel girl_."

But it was more and less than that. It was the first time since the Change began that he had spent a night alone. Christopher stayed with him all the time now, making him eat when he didn't want to eat, keeping him alive even when Wikus cursed him for it.

Fucking Christopher, thought Wikus bitterly. Hadn't he read the sociologist report, about the absence of empathetic behaviour in the Poleepkwa species? "Fooking prawn," he said to the empty night.

In a moment of self-hatred he touched himself _down the__r__e _with his prawn hand, snatching it away only when his thoughts stuttered to an image of Christopher touching him, his penis swelling against his segmented claw.

A few weeks ago, he would have sobbed, but tonight he was all cried out.

When sleep came, it came upon him like some slinking, graceless thing, smothering him into darkness.

* * *

The next two days he spent rather aimlessly looking for food that hadn't recently been picked up from the side of the road and anything that might conceivably be wearable and washable. Stealing was not out of the question yet, but years of middle-class conditioning made it hard to see a theft all the way through.

His find of the second day consisted of an unopened packet of chocolate biscuits and a long coat that actually fitted him.

He was surprised at how much time even simple things took up. A whole afternoon was spent trying to dry shave with a pink plastic disposable razor he'd scavenged out of rubbish.

He scraped away at his face. He wanted to be presentable somehow. He couldn't put his finger on the impulse, but in the rusted piece of mirror his pitiful little mustache seemed to retract into the blue re-growth.

"Sweetie-man!"

At the sudden sound of the prawn kid's delighted trill, he cut himself on the chin. In disgust he threw the offending razor away.

The kid trotted up to him, grabbed the fabric of his stolen jeans. "Where did you go?"

"I've been busy," he muttered. His face stung. The Change was making him shake. If Junior was here, then Christopher couldn't be far away.

Sure enough, a long, slender shadow fell over the pair of them. Wikus patted the remains of his mustache, tried to smooth down hair that had decided to stick up at odd angles. He has a sudden need not to look so shabby, like when he was courting Tania and had to see her father...

Or see her?

He shook the question from his mind.

"Leave him alone Little One," Christopher said curtly. "He's busy."

Wikus found himself falling into old habits. He remembered an MNU psychological test describing him as officious to cover up his not being very assertive. He had been deeply offended, only because in his secret heart he knew that the test had been right. His eyes darted about, not settling on Christopher.

It was only until the prawn began to walk away did he run after him.

"Christopher, I'm sorry about the other day. I wasn't thinking."

Christopher let out a non committal sound.

Wikus scratched his head. He was restless. The encroaching pain was chasing sharp eddies along his spine. He wanted to...

"Uh, if you have some time can we go into your place and, uh... you know. I have time." Wikus could hear the pleading whine in his voice, like a junkie begging his dealer to relent of a credit problem, just once.

"No," said Christopher, not stopping.

Wikus followed him, anger rising. "Listen man, I said I was fooking sorry. You can't just stop it all of a sudden like that."

He caught up with Christopher, thinking that maybe if Christopher got a whiff of pheromones he might be less difficult. Might take him behind one of the shacks. Might make the pain go away.

"No," said Christopher. "I have to go to work at sunset." He nodded to where the evening sun was low against the sky, throwing the massive bulk of the ship into a spiky silhouette.

He then looked at Wikus. "Sister Carrie will want to see you."

Before Wikus could answer, he scaled a row of huts and was gone.

* * *

That was Christopher's job, demon working with a nun, like one of those Hieronymus Bosch paintings where pale sinners were menaced by filthy beasts of the Abyss.

If Sister Carrie ever had that image as well, she never showed it. She was a medical officer attached to an Anglican aid-agency, one of the many that tried to give assistance to "all God's creatures, even the ugly ones."

The NGOs were stationed in a nest of concrete buildings surrounded by razor-wire. The guard at the gate gave Wikus a suspicious look before Sister Carrie admonished him loudly and had him invite Wikus in.

Together they walked to the Sister's clinic, not so far away.

The line of refugees - prawn and human - was long, so it was not until later that night that Sister Carrie pulled him aside from the soup line, where he was angling for a third bowl.

"Oh Wikus, it's good to see you."

She held him, human hand and prawn hand, and it had been so many weeks since he'd had any simple intimacies that he was overwhelmed and began to sob. She wrapped her arms around him, patted a back rough with exoskeletal protrusions, murmured, "There, love, there. Better out than in."

Sister Carrie hadn't always been a nun, Wikus knew. But a few days after her graduation from one of the country's most prestigious universities, the aliens had come. Swept up in religious hysteria (though he would never say it to her face) she had joined an order, and later taken her vows.

Unusually for those who had been struck by the madness of those first years, she had kept her promises. Now she managed a clinic for treating the poor and homeless. None were more poor and homeless than Poleepkwa.

"Your Change has not progressed as quickly as I thought it would," said Sister Carrie.

"It's slowed down."

"I'll still need to do a medical check up on you."

Wikus agreed, if only to spend a few more minutes with a sympathetic human being.

She weighed him, and made notes about his eating habits, how the food went in, the condition of it when it came out, the extent of his transformation. She took his temperature, measured against a chart. She gave him vitamins, and strict orders to take them.

"Your condition has definitely slowed. Your skin is starting to heal nicely. I know it's a difficult ask when living in the District, but try to keep the edges as clean as possible."

Then she gave him a white hospital gown, and made him lie down for an internal exam.

A little fearful, he lay back. The air-conditioning made his bare thighs prickle.

She peered at his nether regions.

"You're still human in that department. How's your erectile function?"

"Uh uh..." He could feel his cheeks burning. "I can still get... uh..."

Sister Carrie pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, lubed them up from a container by the examination bed. "We'll see what's going on inside. Please excuse my cold fingers, love. My circulation is not as good as it could be."

With gentle authority she parted his slightly resisting knees and pressed two fingers into his cloaca. He gasped and jumped. She looked at his wincing face, stroked his bare thigh as if trying to calm a wounded animal.

"Easy dear, it won't take long."

She palped the edges of his prostate, and the new organs crowding their way into his pelvic cavity. She tested the length of his alimentary canal as far as she could reach and he looked up at the grimy ceiling with the fly-specks and his lip quivered and tears spilt over.

Her fingers slid out from their examination and carefully probed the entrance.

"There's some trauma to the vent. Are you tender there?"

He nodded, and hardened his trembling jaw and stared up at the ceiling as if willing it to fall on him..

"When was the last time you had sexual contact?"

He couldn't help but look at her sharply. He was living in District Nine. To admit to sex was to admit he was fucking a man or a prawn. Ingrained prejudices rose up in him.

"What are you fooking saying? That I'm a fooking poof?"

She touched his bare knee. "Wikus, your circumstances are similar to a lot of people in that place. This is no time to be shy."

Wikus heaved a breath and looked across at a wall. A poster warned child sex workers on the dangers of HIV. He thought of Ntozake. He thought that even being fucked by a native was better than what he was doing. How many children had lain on this table, injured from forced sex, little girls and boys who would never have childhoods?

"Two days ago," he whispered. "Not a man." It was as if he was confessing to a sin beyond imagining. He half expected her to suck in a gasp. Withdraw in horror. Tell him to leave.

But she did not.

"And when will you have it again?"

The curtain stirred. In the next room Christopher was dispensing anti-virals to a woman and her two children. The woman was looking at him suspiciously. Her children only smiled. Wikus could see the jut of Christopher's exoskeleton every time he moved. His uneven eyes were drawn to the curve of Christopher's abdomen, the glossy segments sliding against each other as he leant over the desk.

Wikus looked back at Sister Carrie. She must think him filthy now, beyond deviant. He was fraught with need and the pain. "Tonight," he breathed.

Sister Carrie did not miss the object of his glance.

"Go have a shower dear. Eat whatever you want. Then let's have a chat."

* * *

_(To Be Continued)_

_*NGO - a Non Government Organization such as Red Cross or Medicines Sans Frontiers..._


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

...

...

...

...

God, Wikus thought, to have a hot shower again! He stood under the spray and worked away days of dirt that bathing in the rainwater drum had not dislodged. He stood until the water ran cold.

In the mirror, he was haggard. Someone else was staring out from behind his odd eyes. Now he could see the damage the Change had brought on him. His left arm was almost entirely given over to the product of prawn DNA, a huge slab of his back and left flank. Like an invading army, nodules of greenish exoskeleton had set up camp in the enemy territories of his right shoulder.

His nakedness repulsed him, and he quickly turned away.

Sister Carrie waited up on a small, rooftop balcony. In the district the fires of the District burned.

Is this what it felt like to be an alien? Only weeks had passed yet he sat down next to the small table and barely knew what to do with the china cups and the teapot.

In the distance the ship hovered over Jo'burg, a dark blot over the stars, illuminated only by flashing rows of blue warning beacons.

Sister Carrie poured the tea.

"What's that on your lip? A moustache?"

He patted his little masculine symbol defensively. "What's wrong with it? My father has one."

The thought of the senior Van Der Merwe made Wikus automatically uncomfortable. His father had never seen his soft young son as deserving of all his love. Wikus had never inherited strength of his Boer ancestors, those men and women shaped by hardships under the great African sky. In Nicholas Van Der Merwe's eyes Wikus was soft and coddled by his mother, almost undeserving of the family name.

Sister Carrie shrugged "Oh, it's a just rather official for life in the District, that's all."

She gave him his cup, which was so full he had to use his alien hand to balance it.

"So many indigenous tribes, all over the world," she started.

"Wikus was slurping at his tea, and looked up, puzzled. "Excuse me?"

"When that ship appeared in the sky, didn't we all feel a little like that? Seeing the newcomers appear from the nothingness, this technologically advanced race we knew nothing about. Remember those first months?"

"Um..."

"Oh, you would only have been a child then. But I was your age, and it was proof of God, sending his angels to us. We expected creatures of great beauty, holiness and light." She sipped from her teacup and sighed. "The day we cut open the ship and saw what lay inside - that will always rate as humanity's Great Disappointment. Not angels. Not even men."

"I was young. I don't really think about it."

She gave him a wan smile. Pre-apartheid she might have been in that netherworld between white and coloured. Her skin was one thing, her face another. But age was the great equalizer. All old people ended up looking the same.

"How long have you been having sex with him, Wikus?"

Wikus nearly gagged on his Earl Grey.

"I'm not having sex..." he spluttered. "That act, that f.. With a prawn... you think...you think I do it for..."

He would have sworn at her again, but she was a nun, and he retreated into himself, folding his arms and frowning darkly.

How could he describe how it started? He only remembered pain, and Christopher fetching Sister Carrie from the NGO compound one night. He would later learn that Christopher had risked getting arrested or shot, covering Sister Carrie through the dangerous trek into the District. Wikus had lain in the shack shaking with fever, the transformation burning through his cells like an infection, his alien hand a roasting bar on the end of his stump.

"He won't eat," clicked Christopher. "He won't drink."

"He needs a hospital," Sister Carrie had replied urgently. "He needs medication, pain management."

Reaching up with the last of his strength, Wikus had grabbed her arm. His digging fingers must have hurt the older woman terribly, but she did not pull away. "No hospitals! They're still looking for me."

"Help him," Christopher pleaded.

"I can't force him to go. He's right. He's still a wanted man."

"He frightens my child."

Sister Carrie had paused, then. "I'll see what I can do."

She had peeled his clammy human arm away from his body, injected him with morphine.

Nothing had happened. He remembered her trying to explain to Christopher how all her avenues were exhausted.

Even though they stood several paces away, he could hear them clearly.

"Christopher, our medicines won't work. His biochemistry must have already affected his nervous system. I don't have anything that will work. It's up to your technology, not ours."

Intermittent gunfire crackled over the shack, and the sound made Wikus moan.

Christopher had escorted Sister Carrie away.

Wracked with pain, Wikus lay back on the sleeping pad. His throat was sandpaper dry, but the thought of drinking made his throat close up. He shook hot and cold. He stunk of rotting flesh, dribbled black fluid from every orifice.

He wanted to die.

Later that night Christopher came to him. He told his child to wait outside.

"But it's late, Father."

"Wait outside Little One, I must take care of this."

For a grateful second he thought Christopher was going to kill him.

He did not. He gently removed Wikus' clothes, peeled the damp fabric off his sweating body, slicing through them with claws when zippers and buttons were too much. Wikus didn't care about his nakedness. He lay on the sleeping pad like a peeled white slug, waiting for the slash through his neck, ands plunge of a hand into his ribcage.

In a corner of his mind not yet mad from agony, he'd felt the creature lying behind him.

Christopher's clicks were strange, Untranslatable. He sounding song of a parent to a child. But Wikus was human, and the sounds meant nothing to him.

And then Wikus felt the segmented hand reaching around from behind him, sliding between his cramping thighs, spreading them apart.

Something had tamped between his legs, insistently. With dulled recognition Wikus had realised it was a part of Christopher. An alien part. A sex part.

Wikus thought, so this would how he would end up, raped by a creature, sodomised by a creature, when he was too weak from thirst and hunger to fight back. If he had not been so wracked, he would have screamed. Would have pushed him away.

But he had lain there, dazed, buttocks grazing against Christopher's hard pelvis. One leg was pulled over Christopher's rough hip as the prawn kept trying to find the small entrance with his hard _thing_, jabbing at soft flesh.

Their bodies were so foreign to each other. Christopher had clicked in frustration until finally Wikus had put his human hand down there, in some mad act, akin to suicide. Had touched the long, hard ridges of the thing. Had guided Christopher inside him, (inside him, oh fuck, like it was fucking consensual) and over the physical shock and pain of entry he heard a rattling sound as Christopher vocalized a raw non-human emotion.

The clicking had increased to the trill of crickets in summer time. Wikus tried to put his mind elsewhere.

It had not taken long. Christopher had been clumsy, as nervous as Wikus trying to fuck Helen. A few short, shallow jerks into Wikus' newly-formed cloaca, followed by rattled sobs and then the _whatever-the-fuck_ happening, that feeling of being caulked up inside.

But a strange, soporific feeling had come over him. For the first time in a week his muscles had released from their clench. He all of a sudden did not care what had happened to him. He just wanted to sleep.

Now Sister Carrie looked at him as he relived the memory. She did not have to ask. She could see it in his face.

"How long have you known?" His voice came out in a strangled rasp.

A moth batted a nearby light globe and she shooed it away.

"He came to me two months ago. Oh Wikus, he was in such turmoil. He was afraid of hurting you. He wanted to know how humans make lo--"

He threw his cup down in disgust, breaking it.

"I'm not a prawn fucker!" he shouted. Sister Carrie did not move, let Wikus have his moment of rage.

All Wikus could think of was that she knew. The last few times that he had see her, she _knew_, knew he was bending over to take prawn cock like one of Mbube's prostitutes.

"I'm not a deviant! I'm a good person. I have a wife who loves me. I have a fooking home."

"And where are these things, Wikus? They may as well be a million miles away on the other side of the universe. There is only one person you know who can understand what it is to be like that, cast out from home, unable to return, to be lost and powerless."

So frustrated with the unfairness of his life, he was close to tears. He was a prawn fucker, a dirty prawn fucker.

"But why should it help?" he spat, why should having his... his thing... in me. Why should it help?"

She shrugged, put her cup aside, stretched. She was used to unfairness, She saw it every day from her balcony. "We've only studied worker reproduction. Perhaps the elites are different. Perhaps they reproduce by traumatic insemination, like insects."

"Traumatic..."

"It makes sense that one can anesthetize one's partner, especially if they are highly sentient, like yourself."

Wikus started at her, aghast. He'd seen the television documentaries of bedbugs spearing each other through their abdomens, the sexual violence they forced on each other in order to continue their species.

Her eyebrows raised at his horrified expression.

"They aren't human dear. It may be completely normal for them to act this way."

She stood up, picked up the dashed pieces of the cup, watched as Wikus ran an agitated hand through what was left of his regulation haircut. "Fook, traumatic insemination, fook."

"Dear, just tell him to retract the barbs when he has to, how can I be delicate, _make a quick exit_, won't you?" The nun smiled at him, as innocent as a saint's portrait. "I don't want to be stitching you up in your delicate places if you know what I mean."

* * *

He couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear imagining it, and yet it was all that he could think of.

What had she told Christopher when he'd come to her, all four hands wringing like his child's would, come to her with his confession?

Once was forgivable, but again and again?

In his miserable state Wikus found it easy to gloss over the fact that he was the one who initiated the most contact, been the most demanding.

But finding out from a nun! Had she capitulated, told Christopher how to have sex with a human? Her, with all her vows of chastity telling an insect the gross mechanics of sex, knowing that he was going to fornicate with a human?

Or even worse, had she escaped to the poetry of language, told Christopher about love and intimacy, told him about foreplay, about lovemaking, of the caress of tongue and skin while looking at Christopher's wet tentacles and dry scales and sharp segments and oh Jesus, had Christopher imagined going to Wikus and doing that?

"You're so proper," Tania had said to him once. But he didn't want to tell her that it was a cover for inexperience. Not that he'd not been with women, but he'd been so wound up with anxiety that he'd never really relaxed around them. Not like his Angel, who had been patient and loving, had kissed away all his fears.

When he left Sister Carrie, Wikus didn't want to go back into the District. His emotions were wrought with self-pity and despair. He wanted to be close to someone. He wanted Tania.

He stumbled along backstreets and roads for hours until he managed to pick up an illegal taxi. A few streets from his home, Wikus pushed a crumple of Rand into the taxi-driver's hand and fell out into his street. The manicured lawns and the locked doors mocked him.

Finally he came to his house. That car was outside again, the MNU staff vehicle. But it was not the only one. Tania's fucking father, the cunt. Even from out here Wikus could hear his booming voice through the windows.

Wikus crept up across the lawn he had planted, his in the shrubs he had grown himself from seedling pots, peered like a criminal into his own home. Father-in-law Smit was talking to the executive who was sleeping with his wife.

_Oh, my Tania. S_he looked thinner, distracted. She missed him, he could tell. She had not taken down their wedding photos.

His alien parts went into a spasm. He looked down at his hated hand, hidden under the pilfered coat. He imagined that monstrous hand on Tania's perfect skin and immediately wanted to vomit.

Through the glass, the man who was cuckolding him put his arm around Tania. She rested her head upon his shoulder allowing him to support her. Wikus pulled away, gasping at the hate and helplessness that rose up in him.

When he ran back to the street, the taxi was still waiting there.

The driver was a quiet Zimbabwean man who smelt of licorice and ganja. He rolled down the window. "You want a ride home now?"

The air quality changed as they approached the District. That smell of burning and homesickness. Wikus could pick up the alien pheromones now, could differentiate between hate and listlessness, the smell of the slum.

He halfway imagined - and perhaps it was only his imagination - that he could find Christopher's shack blindfolded. That smell of the elite among them, their InDuna.

Lighting speared across the sky, illuminating the massive cloud front that had built up over the mountains. He was not fast enough to reach the before the first few massive drops of rain began to smash into the parched earth. The sheets of water began to strike him, as if the weather was trying to grind him underfoot.

Inside the shack Christopher was sleeping with his son in his arms. A few computers were crunching numbers for their long journey back to the Poleepkwa homeworld. Long strings of alien numbers scrolled across the screens.

Wikus hesitated, torn between waking Christopher and going into the other room. He wanted to forget his life, he wanted that feeling Christopher brought him. A familiar heaviness settled between his legs, a tight swelling feeling, he was disgusted, and at the same time knew he could not deny what the feeling meant.

In the end the sound of the massive rainstorm on the iron roof woke C.J.

"Sweetie Man!"

Christopher's eyes had a slightly luminous quality in the darkness. He looked up at Wikus standing there in his dripping wet clothes. His mandibles stirred in the phosphene light of the computer monitors, giving away his apprehension. He must have seen something in Wikus' face, for he released his child.

"Go into the other room, Little One."

"I want to stay here."

"I won't be far."

Wikus waited until the child was behind the thin cardboard divider before he started unbuttoning his shirt. What did Christopher think of when he saw him? The flat pale expanse of human skin broken up by the patches of exoskeleton? Was he aroused by it? Was he disgusted by the grub-like softness?

Christopher didn't say anything, only watched Wikus undress with a terrible alien intensity.

Wikus lay down on the sleeping pad. The rain drummed on the roof, cascaded into the gutters, dripped on the old table.

"Please," he whispered.

Christopher moved an exploratory hand down the length of Wikus' hated arm, and normally Wikus would have shied away, slapped him, told him to stop fooking touching me.

But he wanted to go beyond self pity tonight. He wanted to wallow in his abyss, the deepest circle of his hell.

"My child is in the next room," Christopher said, meaning _keep fucking quiet._

Wikus grabbed Christopher's hand and pulled it down over his fluttering stomach, over his erect penis, his tight balls, pulled it to the cloaca, made Christopher feel him. He could smell Christopher's involuntary arousal. The antennae swiveled restlessly, tasting Wikus' scent.

That strange sound again, that cricket in the summertime sound. Then Christopher relented and Wikus took the prawn's weight as he rolled on top.

In the sweating darknessChristopher pushed into him. Wikus held his human fist into his mouth, bit down on his knuckle so as not to cry out. Along his inner thighs he could feel the extraordinary strangeness of Christopher's body, but no less that what was going on inside him. His skin, both human and poleepkwa, was buzzing and aching for touch. His exoskeletal bits gummed and itched. He could not ask for it. He couldn't. He couldn't touch himself anywhere lest Christopher see it as an invitation, stroke him with an intimate gesture, turn this from necessity to deviancy.

So he held his hands overhead, clenched empty air. His body was reacting against all logic. His nipples were hard and sore.

Each time Christopher lunged, each time Wikus felt the flick and dart of Christopher's organ, Wikus arched his back and groaned at his desperate restraint. Christopher implored him to silence with a series of strident clicks, began to push into him faster, long strokes that Wikus could feel in his changed body, against his abdomen, along his legs. His erotic response exposed him, stripped him bare. He was in a shack, fucking a creature. He was experiencing pleasure from it, was not repulsed, wanted it. And he thought of Tania, his lost humanity, his lost life, and he began to sob.

Christopher did not ask what was happening, did not tell him to be quiet. Perhaps Sister Carrie had warned him of this emotion. Hesitantly, Christopher leant forward, and Wikus felt the long ends of the labrum brush the tears from his cheeks.

It was as if an invisible barrier had lifted. Wikus snarled at his own weakness and grabbed Christopher's shoulders, flexed his own hips against Christopher's own, matching each thrust. Christopher wrapped his arms around Wikus' ribcage, lifted him off the ground and he fucked him with all the violence of the storm. Wordlessly they wrestled each other, human and alien, almost as if trying to punish the other.

Wikus could smell himself, his body stunk of alien pheromones, ripe, sexual smells. He wanted to shout, but not in horror, but (oh God) encouragement, Christopher pressed his hand over his mouth to trap the words before they burst from him. His alien penis quivered inside Wikus' body. Wikus murmured Christopher's name, not a curse but an entreaty.

Deep in amplexus, the _whatever-the-fuck_ happened, unexpectedly, shockingly, and Christopher let out a strangled noise, breaking his own caveat.

Wikus shuddered in empathy, felt the furred maxillae vibrate against his collarbone as Christopher's orgasm peaked and held and slowly subsided. The MNU training videos were replaying in his mind, the flat clipped voice of the specialist describing the prawn's minimal pain response, their inability to feel pleasure.

Christopher was trembling, his breath catching in and out of him like a tide. His secondary limbs were no longer tucked under his chest, and now lay sated upon Wikus' ribcage. Wikus didn't want to name the feeling that was in him, a feeling of gratitude, the same as when a woman allowed him into her bed. He didn't want to think of such a thing, not in this situation. It was wrong.

Wikus hadn't come, but as the exotic chemicals seeped into his body, he relaxed, still in Christopher's embrace. Christopher released him first, carefully extracted himself, responsive to Wikus' cautionary murmurs. His segmented hands palmed Wikus' soft skin as if he could tear open at any moment.

But the moment was over. Christopher slunk away, too used to Wikus' depression after sex, his harsh words.

"I'll leave now," he clicked softly.

The rain was sheeting the roof, plundering the sides of the shack.

"No, no," said Wikus, standing on unsteady legs. He went for his clothes, the plastic bag. His insides were pleasantly numb even as the space between his legs stung. "I'll go, you stay with your kid."

Christopher looked at him for a long time before nodding.

Wikus dressed quickly, slung the bag over his head, and headed out into the vicious night.

* * *

(TBC)


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

Part 4

* * *

"So what's it like to become sentient all of a sudden, eh? Is it like you wake up one day and go, good gracious, I'm sentient?"

"Are you suggesting my people aren't sentient?"

"Well, not particularly smart."

"They learnt your language, did they not?"

Wikus had to shrug rather than concede defeat. The MNU sociologist, for all his human bias, had admitted that the poleepkwa species did have advanced language skills, and more than that, a written language.

Wikus remembered an old story of how the initial foray into the ship had yielded only clicking, insectile monstrosities, and everyone had been free with their opinions. By the time their ark had been emptied, finalizing the three-month rescue mission from the ship to District Nine, memos had gone out not to talk in front of them.

Poleepkwa was an easy language to learn. Kids with barely a hundred words of vocabulary could instinctively pick it up. It was as if some convergent evolution had hardwired human brains to, if not speak, then at least to understand.

He followed Christopher over the uneven terrain, stumbling over empty cans and disposable nappies. Christopher made him hold the old canvas mail satchel while he strode on ahead, InDuna, lord of his garbage kingdom.

The other prawn supplicated themselves before Christopher, their secondary arms flashing bright undersides at him. Christopher mostly ignored them. Although they were his people, he was something else altogether.

Christopher Junior trotted alongside Wikus, looking up at him with an expression - if prawns had expressions past the fingering tendrils and their sharp, insect movements - akin to delight. He was a child in love. Every few seconds he would grab Wikus' trouser leg in lieu of his alien hand and Wikus would affect a stony, dead-ahead stare. As soon as he got his cure he was out of here. There was no point in making any attachments.

Helping Christopher scrounge up the alien technology was only realistic thing he could do.

To dislodge himself from the child's grip, Wikus pretended to trip on a old vacuum cleaner pipe. He then ran to catch up, the canvas bag knocking against his thighs.

"What's it like?" Wikus continued. "And if this cure of yours doesn't work, and if I have to change into one of you...?"

Christopher turned back to look at him. The architecture of his face swung in a thoroughly regal manner. "You have spoken to Sister Carrie?"

That traitor and pornographer. "Yeah."

"Then you will know of her stories. Her allegory of the fruit, the knowledge of good and evil." He plucked at the scrap of cloth at his groin. "Covering of nakedness."

Bible stories from the mouth of an alien seemed wicked almost. He had a sudden image of his dour father frowning at him,

"You mean the Adam and Eve story?"

"Like that," said Christopher. "After the plague. After my Queen died, and we became abandoned like children in a storm. I had lived in a paradise of not knowing, as my people live now. And then I knew. Knew of the filth, the way we had become depraved and lost."

There was still problems in translations. Christopher sometimes escaped to metaphor, and Wikus never quite understood him.

"This was when you were still in the ship?"

Christopher picked up the remains of a Playstation unit and inspected it closely. He tore off the plastic shell and pushed the chipset into the bag Wikus was holding.

"Yes. I was still in the ship."

C.J. trotted along beside Wikus, plucking at his knee.

The child said, "Will you stay with us tonight?"

Wikus clutched the canvas bag to his chest, tried to avoid the hopeful look. The night he had last had intercourse with Christopher, that desperate, storm coloured night, he had returned to Michael's shack in a state of confusion. He'd lain there and his hands had traversed the hungry skin of his body, human and alien had alike. He had never felt so alive to tactile contact, as if he would climax from breath alone.

Now Christopher threw an inscrutable alien look Wikus' way. His secondary arms darted in and out, before he turned away and continued his patient search of the rubbish dump.

"Will you stay, Sweetie-Man?" implored C.J.

"No, I don't think I'll be in today. I just need time alone."

He watched Christopher stride on past an old car wreck.

The anesthesia had been intense, had arrested his Change, and he could halfway believe himself reverting to a human. Even now he could feel it in his belly, a warmth and contentment. He rubbed his stomach like a lucky Buddha until the words _traumatic insemination _popped up in his thoughts and left him shuddering.

No missing C.J.'s dejected droop. Heartbroken, the child said, "It's nicer when you're around," before running to catch up with his father.

Wikus swore to himself, and trudged after them.

Not so far away a familiar figure lolled in a doorway. He caught her hot glance.

Ntozake had finished with her human client, but Mbube had yet to return. A cigarette made from tobacco wrapped in newsprint dawdled from her lips.

A tangle of wires was taking up all of Christopher's attention, so Wikus joined her. He declined a newspaper cigarette. She looked tired, twenty years older.

Ntozake tilted her chin towards Christopher. "You made up with him."

"We weren't really fighting," said Wikus. "We just have a contract, yeah?"

Her eye darted to his claw. He tried to hide it behind the canvas bag.

"Will he take you away," said Ntozake, "in his big ship?"

"God, I hope not."

A sneer, then Ntozake ground the stub of the newspaper cigarette under her sandal. Her toes were painted with cheap enamel, the colour of blood. "I wish a poleepkwa would take me away. I hate it here."

Her eyes raised to his. Once she would have been a girl with the world laid out for her, an education, family and friends. Something had happened to bring her this low. It didn't take much. A parent's death. A new lover who didn't want a kid hanging around. The loss of a family fortune to bad business deals.

"Maybe your InDuna will take me," she said. Her eyes narrowed. All of a sudden she was no longer a girl, but as hardened as Mbube seeing something he wanted. "If you do not wish to have him."

* * *

"Darling, please think about it. You don't have to do this alone."

"I'm not alone, am I?" said Wikus. "You made certain of that."

Sister Carrie threw her soapy hands up, exasperated. "I don't hear you complaining about being forced or harassed into it. It takes two people to make love."

Wikus found a strained, croaking noise coming out of his mouth. "Will you stop saying that word!"

"What word, dear?"

Bent over the sink, rinsing out the medical glassware, she could have been his mother.

"Make. Love. I'm letting an insect stick his fooking proboscis into me. That's it. It's not the same as when I sleep with my wife."

"Forgive me then. I'm sure it's not the same."

Her tone was just-almost-not-quite sarcastic, and Wikus found himself letting out the same clicking noise that Christopher did when Wikus was annoying him with human stupidity.

"So?" she asked. "Will you just meet my friends? They're good people. They've assisted the refugees for a long time. You could help them immensely. There's so much we still don't know about poleepkwa biology."

"I don't know. MNU is still looking for me. I'm safer in the District."

"They have scientists, equipment. They'll be discreet. Please, Wikus, just a few days."

He wasn't sure. His treatment at the hospital where his first started Changing had made him wary of anything involving medical tests.

Sister Carrie said, "I didn't want to bring it up, but-" she stopped, mouth pursed. "They have a geneticist with them. An American. He's been studying poleepkwa biology for as long as they've been here and-" she stretched out her hand towards the grubby bandages. "It's not my place to suggest it, but it could mean a cure."

A thin note of desperate hope made his ears ring.

"A cure?"

"I mentioned your predicament. Obliquely mind you, I didn't go into details. He says he's been working with retrovirals. Gene therapy. What has been done, can be undone."

It was a cruel carrot to dangle. He thought of Tania. Wikus had been declared dead. In a few months... in a few months she could marry her new lover. Wikus had to sit down on the examination stool. Suddenly the reprieve from his life seemed so much closer.

"So?"

"I have to discuss it with Christopher," he said without thinking.

She didn't ask why.

"Of course you do."

* * *

The night was one of those cold inland nights, where after a hot day the temperature droops to near freezing.

To say Wikus had ever been outside in the cold was equivalent to saying that the moon landing was space travel. He had often run from a distant car-park to the MNU building, or around the corner to the supermarket. He'd even locked himself outside their house in shorts and t-shirt once, and waited shivering on the porch until Tania had returned from her best friend's hen's night, flushed and drunk. He'd never had to live in it.

The thought of a holiday in civilization filled him with the heightened anxiety of a child waiting for a birthday party.

At the very least he could spend a few days sleeping in a real bed. There would be danger of course, but to live outside of the district, to live among humans!

And, last of all, the cure. Now, not months away, when Christopher had collected enough fluid to bring the drop-ship back to life. Now.

Blanket held over his shoulders, Wikus stepped into the firelight's savage glow. Christopher squatted on his powerful legs, watching the flame dancing in the cut-down shipping container. As usual he seemed distracted, scrawling prawn text in the dirt with a sharpened piece of broom handle.

A short distance away some of the worker prawns were scrabbling over a hank of meat. Wikus knew now that all Christopher had to do was click at them, and their prize would be left at his feet.

"You didn't wait," Wikus said. He hadn't wanted to make the walk back to the NGO camp. Somehow the population at the enclosure's edges seemed more volatile, more violent. The refugees from four countries and two planets clashed regularly.

"You and the Sister were talking. I don't like to leave my child alone for too long."

"I could have been killed!"

"You were in no danger. They know who you are."

Oh, he thought. Great. There was no point in hiding it. "I'm going to go away for a few days."

No reaction, but Christopher dug his stick into the ground in front of him. An old piece of bone was dislodged from the earth. Wikus wondered if it was human or not. Prawns had no problem with eating people.

The silence made Wikus nervous. It had a sound to it, a strange, high pitched vibratory note. Wikus said again, "You know, away? Outside of the District. Sister Carrie wants me to meet some people who can help."

The stick shoved in deeper, dislodging layers of dirt before Christopher said, "You do what you need to do."

"Where's your kid?"

"Inside. Lessons. Before he sleeps."

In the far distance a spotlight swung out over the perimeter of the District. Wikus often wondered why MNU had not tried a house-to-house search. Sister Carrie had suggested the government was leery about international criticism. Once outside of the District and the Non-Human areas, he would be vulnerable.

"Listen," said Wikus, "I know we haven't had much of a chance to speak about the last time we...you know."

He had Christopher's full attention now. The poleepkwa's antennae vibrated sharply. They had spent days in each other's company, exchanging inanities about their cultures, giving away nothing the other didn't already know.

But after that night, Christopher had seemed more agitated, less likely to leave Wikus' side, hardly giving him the privacy to take a piss even. Wikus had pondered what it meant, this sudden guarding behaviour, and the answers frightened him.

They hadn't fucked again. For the first time there was something stronger in Wikus' mind than the encroaching pain.

"Look, I don't want you to think too much about what we did. It's just. It's like a medical procedure. It's something you do and I'm grateful. But I'm still... you're still.."

Christopher didn't say anything. It was the silences Wikus hated the most.

"You're not human mate," Wikus said in despair. "That's a pretty hard fooking mountain to climb."

The other prawn were nearby. They were fighting each other now, sounded like a sack of cats and electric sanders. Christopher hiss-clicked at them to go.

They slunk away into darkness.

"I don't know how long it will be before I come back. They might be able to cure me, eh?"

There. He'd said it. Christopher threw the stick away, slung his elbows onto his double jointed knees and looked into the fire.

"One must never let go of that hope," said Christopher, "of going home."

"Right," said Wikus. He kept by the fire side. The smoke smelt a little toxic, but he was not looking forward to trudging back to Michael's hut. Christopher's was always warmer, what with the computers all going and the ship underneath.

"You don't mind if I stay with you tonight? It's sort of fooking cold."

"I don't mind."

Christopher made no movement. Wikus held his odd hands to the radiant heat and rubbed them together. The alien hand stung.

In the distance, a human was singing, a mournful note repeated, then echoed by companions. An old African song.

Wikus rubbed his changed arm. He didn't even know he was wincing until Christopher asked, "Are you in pain?"

"I can't handle the cold, much." He held up his foreign hand. "Yeah. It sort of hurts."

Then the stillness again, the potentiality.

Ah, what had he said, inviting Christopher to come and ease his pain, give Wikus the only think he knew could stop the sinking agony? Their great differences, the universe that separated them, their separate evolutions, their bodies so different. All conspiring against them.

Christopher approached at a crawl, hunched carapace, tendrils shining wetly in the firelight, and his eyes, so terrestrial. His antennae twitched, tasting Wikus' scent.

Wikus tensed, ready to rebuff him. He could manage a few more days. Sister Carrie's friends had medicines, drugs, scientific juju.

But it could very well be the last time they met. After tonight, he might never see Christopher or the District again. After tonight it would all change. He could forget what he'd done here. And within weeks Christopher would be gone. It didn't matter what happened now.

_Thou hast committed fornication / But that was in another country / And besides, the wench is dead._

It was as if he'd never touched a living thing in his life, as if he was virginal to something more than just sex, but an immensity of knowledge and emotion beyond his species.

He panted at the quickening of fear through his body, and his sudden, unwanted erection was more out of apprehension than arousal.

When Christopher touched Wikus' knee, he jumped.

Christopher reeled back.

"I'm sorry, I should not have presumed--"

Wikus did something he knew he should not do. Did it. Leant forward and with his alien hand touched Christopher's arm, stopped him from withdrawing

"We should. Once more. Just in case." His voice was like a stranger's.

He wished sometimes that Christopher would talk more. Tania had always implored Wikus to talk, sometimes got upset as his monosyllables, his inability to express in words what he was thinking. She said that it made her feel like she was wondering blind.

Was this what it was like, with Christopher's silences?

Surrendering to his aberrancy Wikus lay back, felt his shoulders sliding on the wax of a cardboard sheet. He could be in the poorest place on the planet, dressed in cast-off and rags, but the universe seemed to spin on his fulcrum. He looked up at the stars, Orion hanging up-side down like a crucified martyr, the Southern Cross bright overhead.

He was so afraid.

He didn't want Christopher to fuck him out of a need to lessen pain.

He genuinely wanted closeness. He wanted to be here with this creature this...

._..infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing._

Alive to his own thudding heartbeat he let Christopher undress him. Those alien hands were as delicate as a surgeon's tweezers. Christopher had worked out how to pop the buttons on his shirt, the zipper on his trousers.

Wikus tried to recall lovemaking with Tania, but it was Helen who he thought of, bitchy slutty Helen who had sailed a thousand ships and laughed at the pitiful droop of his penis. Beautiful Helen.

Now he was being unwrapped like a treasure. Christopher made his summertime noise. The cold air stung Wikus' right side, while his other side roasted. Christopher had an immense capacity for generating body-heat and Wikus found himself drawing close despite the sounds of Christopher's _thing_ uncoupling from the hard plates of his pelvis.

Maybe people would be watching. Maybe they would see him, his pale body in the moonlight, serviced by an alien.

Alien hands, mapping him, exploring him. He'd never allowed Christopher to touch him before this. But he owed his benefactor. He had no way to repay him but with his body.

"So soft," Christopher said, hushed clicks, almost a murmur.

Wikus tried to will his body irresponsive, wanted to let Christopher do what Christopher wanted. Even in the cold air the sweat shone on his skin, and then Christopher's mouth was on his chest, his shoulders, his chin, and he opened his mouth to suck in air, to vocalize, he felt one damp labrum flicker against his tongue, almost too much to bear, but then he returned the flicker in a lurch of insanity.

Another joust of tongue and long, curling labrum, and Christopher's secondary mandibles brushed soft on Wikus' stubbled cheeks. They tickled him, and unbelievably, for all the situation was intense beyond words, he laughed, rubbed his nose. The laugher fell away.

"Now, yes," he said, heard the rasp of his own voice.

His mind was running at a million miles at once. He could not yet completely focus on the moment of penetration. Like an anchor cast adrift and seeking any purchase at all, his mind focused on the pitiful sign outside of the District. The human and poleepkwa iconography striving for the same star, a concrete statue stained and marked by shit and bullet-holes and rubbish, and lit by the spotlights of the gulag.

Christopher pulled Wikus' body close, impossibly strong arms, his exoskeleton a few degrees hotter than human blood. Wikus wanted to sob when he felt the alien breach his body's flimsy defenses between his legs, but then Christopher found his pattern, quick and deep.

"Ah god, ah god," Wikus implored the cold slum night. He strove for climax, he wanted it over, he wanted not to be in this place where the ground slipped away and the stars circled over Christopher's great shoulder as the alien drove himself into Wikus' body, plundered him.

They were both riding a wave of heightened senses. The aperture of night was open around them. Christopher shook with restraint. It did not take long. Wikus spilt hot semen across his belly, and in the unbearable few seconds afterwards, the improbable, impossible apex arrived.

Christopher shuddered, strained up, cried out in a discordant striation of sound. Alien ejaculate sent stabs of excitement through Wikus' insides, the dark poison of sex steaming through his blood.

Boneless now, Wikus lay on the cardboard. His skin still tingled. The poison was going to his head. Then he covered his eyes. Had to press down, couldn't think.

Christopher pulled the blanket up around Wikus' naked body, shielding him from the chill he could no longer feel.

"I'll be all right in a minute," said Wikus.

Christopher brushed Wikus' hated hand. Pushed his head forward, trailed his mouthparts over Wikus' chin, his lips. Too emotionally and physically torn to protest, he let Christopher kiss him.

"When do you go?" Christopher asked.

"Just before sunrise."

"And you may not come back?"

Wikus shook his head. Please, he thought, don't let Christopher start to plead for him to stay, don't let him start using the words of the one left behind: _don't go, you're all I have._

Because he felt so adrift now, he might just do anything Christopher asked.

"It's getting cold," said Christopher. "The gangs are marching in the streets tonight. We had better go inside."

Wikus wasn't given a chance to stand up. Like the monster and his bride Christopher scooped Wikus up, clutching clothes, blanket and all, and carried him into his shack.

* * *

_(TBC)_

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

The night opened its arms and embraced the District, and through the slum suburban streets the madness rose and rose. The madness of poverty, the frustrations of being poor in a country where all the poor have gone, from Zimbabwe, from Nigeria, from the Poleepkwa planet.

And in this night Christopher lay with Wikus on the meagre little sleeping pad, hardly big enough for one, and Christopher moved inside the forbidden recesses of Wikus' body, and Wikus was subsumed under his own physical responses. He was invaded, he was forced, he was unwilling.

But no, in deeper and darker parts of his psyche, he wanted this, he was overcome. He was filled with Christopher's presence, the creature inside him, the creature around him. The push and pull against the delicate tissues of his barely-altered cloaca, the gasp of his breath. The little hologram machine on the table cast the glow of a distant planet across the bare surfaces of his sweating, trembling skin.

He stretched his arms up, felt the exoskeleton threatening to erupt through dermal layers. Some unknown chemical in Christopher's labrum made the layers contract and release in exquisite agony every time the alien mouthed him in his sensitive parts. His shoulders. His neck. The hard buds of his nipples, once so useless and odd on his chest, now seemed like twin points of sensory alarm, and Christopher found them, and Wikus gasped, arched into Christopher's touch.

"Ah, Christopher, you mustn't," he pleaded, and did not know why he needed to call this other's name, but needed it with each push of organ into him, with each flick of poison gland against the new and sensitive core. Christopher behind him, Christopher's thick, greedy hands on his body, Wikus echoing that moment of their first intercourse, when Christopher had rolled him on his side and serviced him from behind, giving him blessed, aching relief.

Who knew what Christopher thought? The alien was lost to his own instincts. His body was a weapon and an instrument of pleasure, and his vocalizations were without restraint.

Outside, the gang had come upon the shacks, and were beating them as they passed, and Christopher thrust harder into Wikus, whether in anger for his predicament, or base lust, Wikus did not know, but the orgasm came again in a roil of anxiety and fear and heightened senses, the fires of the mob outside, him so white and vulnerable to both racial and interspecies anger, him being fucked by an alien in the depths of the slum.

When the gang had passed Christopher retracted his barbs, pulled out of Wikus' body and turned him onto his back and Wikus slung his legs around Christopher's narrow waist, begged for him, let the monster fuck him until the darkness swallowed them completely.

* * *

He woke to Christopher's hard chest digging into his back. For a moment he thought Christopher might be dead, before realizing that Christopher's exoskeleton did not move. Only after a minute did his neck gills issue a slow susurration of air. A prawn's oxygen consumption levels were low, the MNU training video had said. They can live underwater, though as sluggish as a mountain climber with hypoxia. They can live in hard gravity, in a vacuum even, for an hour at least.

Wikus had often wondered how the scientists had established the poleepkwa life-expectancy in a vacuum. He thought of the giant autoclave in MNU basement Level 5, and his guilt turned in on himself.

Not long afterwards, something nuzzled into his arms. The kid, the little bug. He'd been present at autopsies of eggs sacs, little prawn-things that were not so much smaller than Christopher's child. Not all had been dead at the first cut of the blade.

Then, he had not cared.

Now the thought made him nauseous, and he could barely look at the living child without thinking of all the dead ones.

"Sweetie-man."

"Kid," said Wikus, wracked with exhaustion. "I'm trying to sleep."

But sleep would not come.

His thighs were stained with the black fluid of their prohibited coupling, his cloacal vent was raw and tender from their sex. He had a sudden thought of waking Christopher, asking to go down on him, a stupid thought, crazy, but the cool dampness of Christopher's labrum seemed to promise both balm and a illicit eroticism.

After tonight, this would all be a memory. Anything seemed permissible now.

But he was still too wrapped up in his human moralities to do what he wanted to do, and his time here was over.

So he rose from the bed and dressed, and the holographic orrery shone in Christopher Junior's eyes.

"Are you leaving?"

"Yes," said Wikus.

"Will you come back?"

"No," said Wikus. "I may not come back."

What had the child witnessed? How could he explain it? He was unhappy enough with his own sexual history.

_Not up to you to explain why. It's his father's job._

Christopher still slept, and for that Wikus was glad. He did not want to go through any emotional scenes. Didn't want to say goodbye. Didn't want to look at Christopher, because when he looked at him, some awful, tight feeling spread into his chest, as if an unseen hand was squeezing his heart.

Outside, the steam from his breath was milky under the floodlights. He ran through the chilly streets of the slum, his alien metabolism giving him a strength he never had before.

At his nominated exit he slid under the razor wire and headed out, towards the low ticky-tacky boxes that made up a south western Jo'burg suburb.

He came to the street corner that Sister Carrie had specified, and he waited, jogging from foot to foot against the cold. Someone was firing a semi-automatic rifle in the distance, a steady _crack-crack-crack._

At last a small white van pulled up, the vehicle beloved by pedophiles and serial killers. The obscured driver threw a balaclava at Wikus, the eyes sewn shut.

"Put this on," he grunted. His accent was foreign. "Put it on and don't ask questions."

The interior of the van smelt of tobacco smoke and the cheap air freshener that comes shaped like pine trees. They drove until the sunlight began to filter through the rough woolen weave of the balaclava. The threads chafed against his skin. How strange, he thought, that in some ways the pain could be numbed or transmuted, and in others his senses seemed honed to a knife edge

Wikus lost track of where they were going. He'd seen a television show where a kidnap victim had identified the suburb by the bridges and roads they crossed, but his driver was not stupid. His internal gyroscope registered several left-turns and figure-eights to throw him off-guard.

"You been living in the District for a while?" asked the driver, his tone that suggesting that he didn't really give a fuck.

"A while."

"I saw you on the news. Were you really scewing the aliens?"

"No," said Wikus.

It wasn't totally a lie. When they'd reported his xenophilia, he'd never had sexual contact with a creature. Then. That had come later, and only with one.

By his own reckoning it was already hard daylight by the time they pulled into a dim garage. Wikus heard the metallic clang of the garage doors, the rattling of chains.

Whatever he was, he was committed now.

"Wikus?"

He recognised the Sister's voce. The driver pulled off the balaclava. Wikus rubbed his itchy face and looked around the room, curious more than scared. It was the internal garage to an ordinary house, if one could call the almost-mansions of the gated suburbs ordinary. He could smell salt from a nearby pool, the gurgle of a filter.

Sister Carrie opened the van door. He stumbled out, disoriented.

"Come on in. You've met Pieter?"

The blond driver owned that same gimlet stare that Koobus had made his own. Wikus found it hard to meet it directly. He followed the sister instead.

He'd feared another hospital, but the safe house was no different from his own, if perhaps he had made twice what he was salaried now, and Tania's cunt of a father had been less tight with the mortgage deposit wedding present.

As a change from his current predicament, it was hard not to stare at the marble columns and the chandeliers and the gold-plated fixtures just a little on the lee side of tacky.

His feet were nearly lost under a plush carpet. His room could easily have doubled as a honeymoon hotel suite at the Hilton. The king size bed was as long as it was wide, built for long sessions of lovemaking.

"It's over the top, I know," said Sister Carrie, her own expression slightly resigned, "but MNU keeps tabs on suspicious house and equipment rentals. A place like this is so lavish, it doesn't fit the specs for an illegal scientific den."

"Is this what it is?"

She smiled. Then her smile faded, and he did not miss the way her eyes glanced to the closed door, and her voice dropped.

"Darling, there have been some developments since I spoke to you last."

"What?"

She held up her hands, urging him not to panic. But how could he not? He was amongst strangers, in a strange house, with a body that was lost in a wasteland of DNA.

"They are good people," urged the nun, "please don't forget that. But their discoveries, their methods, move quickly." She took a deep breath. Her voice was hardly audible. "Don't mention Christopher to them."

"Christopher? Why not?"

"Shh! My dear Wikus, hasn't your time in MNU taught you the value of being politic? This organization, Pro-Forma, it is big, and wide-spread. It's goals are noble, and so are it's people. But in all things, some individuals have their own agendas."

Wikus looked down. Politics? He'd always been useless at them, his progression through the MNU hierarchy a result of incidents and accidents, and his marriage to Tania.

At his pained expression, Sister Carrie only patted his elbow.

"Come on. There's a change of clothes in the closet. Then you can meet the others."

* * *

They had been expecting him. He knew as soon as he saw the row of Velcro closures up the left-sleeve of the new shirt so as to fit his grotesque arm. The other five shirts hanging in the closet all had the same adjustment.

Not certain how he should take this effort, Wikus showered, dressed and left his suite. He could still smell Christopher on himself. In the District it had berely mattered. But now, with the threat of humans and human morals, he relt repulsive, even to himself.

Voices were percolating from the huge central kitchen. A woman was having an argument with a man.

"Why do we persist calling them 'he'?" she was saying. "They don't have genders."

The male returned in a strong American accent, "Calling a poleepkwa 'it' would be a gross insult, though. Bad form."

"How about 'she' then? Surely a race of women can be just as effective."

"It's easier to depersonalize men." That was Sister Carrie. "Easier for MNU to publicly justify the things they do to men, rather than women and children."

Wikus stepped into the kitchen. Three pairs of eyes turned to look at him.

The sister pointed out the other two. "Wikus, this is Joel, and Rennie."

"Hello," said Joel, the American man.

But it was not him that Wikus looked at. It was the woman, his age, the tall, striking woman with the blonde hair and eyes the colour of rain.

"Rennie," he said.

Helen van Rensburg gave him a wan smile. "Wikus."

_Helen._

He was pushed into a corner. He was attacked by his own memory.

_Statutory rape. _

_Of a minor._

Helen. Helen. Helen van Rensburg. Beautiful Helen, who had laughed at him. Slutty Helen, who had gone to the police crying that Wikus van der Merwe had raped her when his embarrassing excuse of a penis had never been inside a woman's body.

Fifteen year-old Wikus crying before his stony-faced father as the mug shots were taken at the police station, tears tracing his pasty cheeks.

The resulting photograph, so ugly. And always, that feeling that followed him all through his adult life, that he was an unlovable, ugly little man, until Tania had come with her healing words and her whispers in the night. Tania, saying that she loved him, that yes, she would marry him, she would take his name.

All his life converged upon him. The life composed of odds and ends, his meaningless little life.

He stood in the kitchen, and looked at the older Helen. It was shocking, how much she resembled Tania, as if his wounded psyche had not forgotten the first of many women to treat him badly.

Shame burned its way through him like a wildfire. He turned without a word and left the house, walked through the plush carpet, walked out the door, oblivious to the others calling.

He had been wrong to think that hell had been Christopher's shack. This was hell. This was the horror completely.

* * *

_(To be Continued)_


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

...

...

...

He was out the front door and across the manicured lawn before anyone could stop him.

Pieter tackled him by a protea bush, and they sprawled out over the grass before Wikus could get a good strike in with his left hand, knocking the big blonde man sideways.

"Wikus, Wikus, no Pieter, leave him!"

It was a female voice. The roaring of blood in his ears was so loud he couldn't tell if it was Sister Carrie, Helen, or some other woman. It could even be Tania for all he knew.

Pieter had pulled out a gun, a semi-automatic pistol, shoved it into Wikus' chest. "You want to try that again? Try it again."

The fight left Wikus. He lay out on the damp grass. Sister Carrie ran to his side.

"Pieter, this is totally unnecessary."

"Unnecessary, Sister?" The gun nosed in harder. "He's fooking MNU!"

"He's a man. We need to give him that respect."

Pieter grunted, "A man. You can work it out when he goes running back to that bitch's teat of a company."

Pieter left, and strode back into the house. Sister Carrie held out her hand.

"Wikus."

He looked up at the sky. The size of it crushed him. "Don't touch me."

"What was it Wikus? Is it Rennie? You know her?"

Wikus saw the nun shoo someone back inside. He knew from Sister Carrie's face that it was probably Helen.

"Yeah, I knew her."

"Can we discuss this back at the house? Please?" Sister Carrie pointed towards the door. "We're not doing very well as a secret organisation if we stand here yelling in the middle of broad daylight about it."

* * *

Ten o'clock in the morning was far too early to be drinking gin and tonics by the poolside, especially when a man with a gun was giving you the eye, but Joel poured a highball and pushed it in Wikus' direction anyway.

"Fucking drink it man, it's medicinal."

"To tell you the truth," said Sister Carrie, "there's not that much quinine in commercial tonic water these days."

"Doesn't matter. My man's gonna drink up, isn't he?"

Joel was speaking to him like Wikus sometimes had spoken to difficult prawns, a kind of condescending tone layered with a hint of threat.

Angry, he finished the glass and felt the heat rise up behind his sinuses.

The Sister and Joel excused themselves, and for several minutes Wikus was left alone by the poolside. A nearby radio was bleating out a Kenny and Dolly song as if to rub in the absurd turn his life had taken.

Finally he heard the steel chair of the outdoor setting scrape over the paving stones. He didn't turn to look.

Helen poured herself a drink from the same bottle of Bombay Sapphire, and didn't bother to top it up with tonic water.

"What do you want me to say?" she asked. There was a sandpaper edge to her voice. "That after I'd lied to the police about you, I hated myself and wanted to die?"

He looked at her now. She was beautiful, of course, age had matured her in all the right ways. Now she was striking in the way Tania was only pretty. But she did nothing for him.

"Did you?" He said. "Did you hate yourself the fooking way I did?"

Helen made a face. "I was fifteen years old, a mess. You, they'd have slapped on the wrist. David, they would have killed."

"Who's David?"

"You didn't know?"

Wikus shook his head.

She looked down at her empty glass. "Guy I was with. Coloured. My fucking dad would have shot him if he'd known. The only way I could get the abortion-"

"Abortion!"

"-was if he thought I'd been knocked up by a white guy. Wikus. It wasn't personal. I had no other option."

Her accent was only vaguely South African. She had been away a long time. Dolly Parton was singing about sailing away to another world and the sun was too hot and the gin sat in the stomach like a cup of acid.

He could barely hear himself speak in reply. "It destroyed my life, Helen. I was nearly thirty years old before I could..." He clenched his jaw, almost rigid with shame and embarrassment. "_Perform_." His mustache itched. He wanted to throw up. He was self-aware to the point of agony.

Nearly thirty, and in all that time he had been despised for his fumbling hesitation, his clammy, fearful hands, the way he could smell the sour fear in his armpits.

"Don't try to make me guilty," she hissed. "You were only friends with me to fuck me!"

Wikus opened his mouth in protest. He'd heard the rumours back then. But Helen had asked him out, not the other way around.

"Anyway," she said. "It's done now. Twenty years, and you're married. No harm, no foul."

Pieter watched them from the other side of the pool, as unemotional as a sphinx.

"Anyway," she said. "Joel thinks he can cure you. I'm tired of this conversation. I'm going for a swim."

* * *

During the rest of the day Wikus met two more Pro Forma members, who unloaded and added to what was already a well stocked laboratory.

Joel had been given a heads-up on Wikus' bad experiences. He examined Wikus in the guest kitchen instead.

Stripped naked except for a thin towel across his hips, Wikus was again made to lie back and put his mind elsewhere. The problem was, the most elsewhere thoughts tended to involve Christopher.

"That's an amazing symbiosis going on there, Joel said. Especially since our biochemistries are so different. Do you feel any pain?"

"Not at the moment."

Sister Carrie took a breath, and began to explain in her most cool and scientific terms what Wikus allowed Christopher to do to him.

However, she did not mention Christopher by name.

"You had penetrative sex with a Poleepkwa."

Wikus nodded, wondering what Joel was thinking, looking at him.

"Who?" Joel demanded. "Poleepkwa don't have intromittent organs."

"We're not certain," Sister Carrie interrupted before Wikus could say anything. All I know is that the Poleepkwa called for someone to come and he came and...they did what they do."

Over Joel's shoulder, Carrie glared at him to continue the charade.

"I didn't look at him." Wikus found himself speaking through clenched teeth.

Sister Carrie nodded behind Joel, a relieved look on her face.

"An Elite," breathed Joel. That means there's an Elite in District 9." He turned to Sister Carrie. "You knew."

"I suspected," said Sister Carrie. "But the visitors are protective, and whomever he is, he doesn't want to be found."

Suddenly Sister Carrie's warnings all made sense. She didn't want Pro Forma, or whomever these people were, to find out about Christopher. But why? Was she trying to protect Christopher, or was it for her own selfish instincts alone?

Joel pulled on some rubber gloves, which had the odd dichotomy of making his touch more and less bearable at the same time. He was no longer human, but to be not human was to be Christopher, and the alien had that same precise, exploratory mode of touch that a scientist had.

Wikus tried not to think, but that warm, rubbery touch kept pulling him back to the night before, the sweet hungers pulsing through him, and the way Christopher's touches always seemed so right.

It was an accident. Joel was measuring the exoskeletal crust on Wikus' chest with a tape measure. His knuckles brushed over his sensitive nipples and Wikus let out an involuntary groan and realised - to his horror - that he was erect under the sheet.

"Ah Jesus," he said, "that's so embarrassing."

Joel stood back, knocking his clipboard off the table stand. Fortunately Sister Carrie had decided to take the moment to make a cup of tea.

"Hey man, alien hormones and everything," said Joel with a wry grin. "You wanna go take a cold shower or something? I'll do some skin and blood samples afterwards."

"Yes, yes," Wikus stammered, and still clutching the sheet he staggered through the silly push carpet to the bathroom.

He'd never been this hard since he was a teenager. His fingers seemed too rough on the delicate skin of his shaft, but he couldn't come. Trapped in a priapriatic nightmare he stood under a cold shower for five minutes.

There was no way out. He used his changed hand, the thigh suction pads kissing the inflamed surfaces, thought of Christopher.

He thought of Christopher's mouthparts on his skin, the tapping and tickling and the vibrato feeling when he vocalised. He thought of Christopher's thing pushing against the still-puckered cloacal vent, seeking entry. He thought of Christopher's weight on him, Christopher's belly, undulating against his own, Wikus' sweat making the abdominal plates shine.

"Oh, oh fook..."

The orgasm roared through him. His groin muscles fluttered and contracted, and he wept at the empty feeling between his legs. In any other moment Christopher would be still deep inside Wikus, clutching Wikus' grub-soft body to him, his neck gills hitching and releasing.

In his mind he heard the quick cricket-chirp sound's Christopher made before he climaxed, or whatever-the-fuck. Wikus pressed his cheek against the cold glass of the shower-stall, the last, almost-painful throbs spilling into his prawn-hand.

Did the fucking alien get off on it too? Did he get turned on by Wikus' pitiful, ruined body?

_So soft,_ Christopher had said, _so soft._

It was an idea he could barely comprehend. Hard enough thinking of a woman who wanted him in such a way when he was normal. Even his relationship with Tania was built on her kindness and their friendship, not lust and erotic hunger.

Was he an object of desire?

For a fooking alien?

That look in Christopher's eyes when Wikus lay down and spread his legs. Yearning and despair. Even when Christopher said no, all Wikus had to do was remove his clothes and Christopher would submit.

"I'm so fooking stupid," he groaned to himself. "Fookin' selfish and stupid."

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Hey man," came Joel's voice. "You still in there?"

"Yeah, I'm just coming out."

He felt tired and dizzy. He just wanted to sleep.

Or maybe masturbate again and _then_ sleep. He wanted to sort out his thoughts of Christopher, work out what they meant, why they made him feel this way.

Even more strange - he wanted to see Christopher again. To do what? To apologise. To explain that he hadn't understood what he was doing.

_To fuck him again, Wikus?_

Maybe even that. But he wouldn't know until he saw him.

When Wikus pulled on his clothes over his goose-fleshed skin and walked out the door, he had worked out what he was going to say. But all thoughts stopped when he stepped back into the kitchen.

A big prawn was standing in the centre of the kitchen, inspecting the row of empty blood tubes Joel had prepared for the samples. His exoskeleton was black, rimmed with yellow, making him look like a poisonous thing.

It turned sharply towards Wikus.

_"Who are you?"_

Wikus was startled. The creature had spoken. Not in clicks, but in recognisable, if garbled English.

"You can talk?"

The prawn gave Wikus a flat, dead look. Maybe not, then.

Helen arrived, carrying another crate of tubes. She stopped in her tracks when she saw them staring each other off.

"Oh, Alexander, this is Wikus. Wikus, Alexander. Now that introductions are over, help me with unloading the equipment, can you?"

Alexander did not move. The maxillae jerked spasmodically. "Your hand?"

"He's been infected with Poleepkwa DNA," Helen replied.

"How?"

"We're going to run some tests, see if we can identify the mechanism of infection, revert it even."

If not for the prawn speaking English, Wikus would have ignored him. But spoken language was not something ordinary prawns could manage. Not even Christopher.

Alexander fixed Wikus with the same dead look. Wikus was uncomfortable. There was something very wrong about him. His manner was not the innocent stupidity of the usual garden-variety prawn, or the emotive, deep expressions of Christopher and his son. It was almost - institutionalised.

Helen must have noticed Wikus' confusion.

"Alexander is an Elite. We found him among a group of Poleepkwa isolated for genetic testing in Arizona." She looked at the big prawn, and something akin to triumph leapt in her face. "They were going to kill him, but we got him out."

"Uh... I thought the Elites all died."

"An Elite can grow," said Alexander in his buzz-saw accent, "In an isolated population, if there is no Elite available. An Elite can grow, become powerful, become smart. Not enslaved."

"Like a Queen Bee," added Helen with an almost vicious smile.

He turned to see Sister Carrie returning with Joel. Sister Carrie squeezed Wikus' elbow in a gesture that would seem to be a casual show of affection, but in reality her fingernails bit deep.

"I'm glad we're all getting along, Wikus." The nails dug in harder. "I see you've been introduced to Alexander."

"An Elite," croaked Wikus.

Helen nodded. "Now that we have an Elite, we can organise properly. The worker Poleepkwa will follow us. Pro Forma will be a force to reckon with."

Wikus snuck another glance at Alexander. He'd seen death-row prisoners with more life inn their eyes. This was a sentient creature? This?

"Uh, how many Elites do prawn - I mean - Poleepkwa have?"

"Only one per population," said Joel, joining Helen. "We haven't yet worked out the complete Poleepkwa social structure, but it's analogous to a bee-hive. Only one can be a Queen, and in Arizona, that was on the other side of the world. Ergo, they evolved an Elite."

"He's unique," said Helen. "There's no other like him in all the world."

"Uh, that's smoothing I need to talk to you about," said Joel. "Alexander will be able to supervise the inventory. Let's get another drink. Outside."

* * *

"Alexander's not quite the only one," Joel explained. He nodded at Wikus. "We believe there may be another Elite Poleepkwa, somewhere in District Nine."

Helen glared at Wikus, as if he'd slapped her. "Another? Nonsense! They would have shown up by now!"

"It makes sense," said Sister Carrie, "that the District would grow an Elite. But as we cannot search through two million individuals, we won't know for certain."

Wikus could sense Sister Carrie's agitation. Was this why she had been at such pains to hide Christopher's existence?

Through the large glass windows he could see Alexander cataloguing the lab equipment. No doubt he was smart like Christopher. But the District, for all that it was a slum, was a society. A genetic testing unit in Arizona would be a high security prison. There would be no socialization, no empathy, no concern or love or assistance or a thousand little things that made a creature sentient. Alexander would be nothing less than psychopath.

"You know the other Elite?" Helen was demanding him. "You know who it is?"

"I know they have one. I can't say we've been properly introduced," Wikus mumbled. A cold sweat was running down his spine.

"Yes, yes," Sister Carrie said emphatically. "He's hidden deep."

Helen ran a hand through her blonde hair. "That does make things difficult. Two Elites. Fuck."

All of a sudden a sharp pang of concern stabbed him in the gut. He wanted to run. He was living the last two seconds of the shadow that falls over you before you are crushed.

"I beg your pardon," said Wikus, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice, trying to sound casual, vague, trying and failing, "but what would happen if two Elites met up? Uh - if District Nine's elite and your one, met up?"

"It would be bad," said Joel, "if what happens in nature is any indication."

"Bad? How bad?"

"They will fight," said Helen. "To the death."

* * *

_[To be continued]_

* * *


	7. Chapter 7

* * *

...

...

...

"You should have said something" Wikus hiss-whispered. "Why didn't you say something?"

He wanted to shout, but he couldn't trust anyone not to be listening. Not Helen, who was showing off Alexander to the new Pro Forma members inside the house, not Joel, especially not Pieter, whose cold blue eyes followed Wikus everywhere.

After Helen had made her announcement, Sister Carrie received a page from the UN Compound, had been called away on urgent business. Wikus had watched her go, leaving him in this den of wolves, leaving him with his fragile secret.

She'd shot Wikus an imploring look as she left. _Say nothing._

The rest of the day seemed to be a Pro Forma reunion of sorts. The secret organization was anything but small. Wikus counted a dozen different faces and names before he decided to give up remembering them all. They muttered and discussed his arm while Wikus sat, shell-shocked.

Helen kowtowed around Alexander like a courtier in some creepy Machiavellian plot; love and fear and cunning appraisal combined, showing off her control of this pet Poleepkwa of hers.

If Alexander had any idea of his place in Pro Forma, he gave away nothing. The Elite followed Helen and the others with all the self-awareness of a mechanical thing. He did what they asked of him.

Wikus recalled the District men who kept mothership-vermin as fighting stock. One fellow, a cross-eyed Namibian, had kept a vicious scorpion-thing and won nearly every bout until he had ended up dead, stuffed behind the communal latrines.

Around Alexander, Helen was like him, confident with her prizefighter. That confidence made Wikus uneasy. Prawns were only accidentally violent, like big clumsy children. Who knew what Alexander was capable of?

That evening Helen knocked on his door. "Join us for dinner, Wikus," she said. "Let us eat like civilized people."

"I'd rather eat up here."

"It's not right, locking yourself away like this. That's what MNU would do to a medical experiment. It's not what we would do to you."

He agreed, only because refusing might seem to defensive, in light of what he knew. If he refused, then they would ask questions to his motivations, and if they asked questions, perhaps Christopher would be in greater danger than he already was.

Wikus parked himself next to Joel, who was in the middle of a wide-eyed conversion monologue.

"...so here I am, involved in a cross between the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and being a regular alien doctor Mengele, and I was lost, so lost. Pro Forma gave me hope for us as a human species."

Alexander sat at the head of the table. His table-manners were impeccable. Helen was delighted every time her pet spoke a polite phrase in English, but Wikus knew that all this civility was a skin over darker instincts.

"When we found him," said Helen over the vegetable korma, "he had not seen another living creature for a two years."

She nodded at the Pro Forma members, reveling in her audience's shockd expressions. "MNU were trying to measure the pheremonal response of a poleepkwa in forced isolation. He had already killed two of his handlers before we found and freed him."

"Why ever would they do such a thing as that?" asked a young woman to Helen's right. Her name was Elizabeth, Wikus remembered, Joel's assistant.

"Space travel, perhaps," mused Joel, "The newcomers obviously have to cover some amazing distances when they travel. Do they go faster than light? Or do they breed entire generations in their ship-hives?"

"Imagine how secure their culture must be," said another man, "if they could trust that their goals would endure from one generation to the next."

Helen nodded emphatically. "But their technology defies our attempts to access it. The ship itself is a living creature."

She turned to Wikus, watched him pick anxiously at his meal. Knowing his need for meat to feed his alien parts, the cook had served him a slab of microwaved chicken-loaf. Pro Forma still echoed its environmental roots, and most of its members were vegetarian.

"What about you, Wikus? You must have heard some terrible stories of MNU's experiments with Poleepkwa. I've seen some pictures of near full-term egg cases being cut open..."

"I wasn't involved with that side of things," Wikus mumbled. He didn't want to be dragged into an argument about the evils of MNU. If not for his infection and change, he would more than likely be still working with them.

He excused himself to bed early, cursing Helen, cursing everyone, cursing the hand changing at his side.

It was a child's bedroom, despite the new arrivals and the adult furniture. When the lights went out, glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling made a random constellation of stars.

He imagined Christopher Junior pointing, saying, "_which one is home Father?"_

Only one night separated his time from Christopher and his time here. Only one night. He shouldn't even begin to be feeling withdrawals.

But this tightness in his chest, this anxious, breathless feeling. Even a fleeting possessiveness, when he thought of the way the other prawns puffed and displayed themselves to Christopher, seeking the approval of an elite.

Perhaps seeking more than approval.

And he was here, nearly a hundred miles away.

Fuck you, he thought. Fucking prawn. Fucking creature. Fucking insect. Making me do this.

His hated hand rubbed over his groin, his body, his thighs. He groaned, bucked up, let his tongue sweep along the furred upper lip. His erotic compulsion had been warped and twisted. He could feel the hard ridges at his cloacal vent release, imagined Christopher watching him with that peculiar intensity that he had.

Under the blankets he let his knees fall apart and rocked in time to an internal, ancient rhythm. His body ached and hungered. He thought of a hard hip, long leg, the tickle of mandibles against his face. He scratched his stomach with his free hand, wanted the feeling of segments there, the flutter of secondary limbs against his chest.

"Christopher," he hissed, feeling his way around the name, wondering how the true one was spoken, the name of Christopher's own language.

Wikus would have stroked himself to orgasm if it wasn't for the shadow that stopped underneath the door.

Only a slice of light came through, but Wikus knew that somebody was out there sniffing him out, sensing him.

That someone was Alexander, he was certain. The elite prawn could smell him, could smell his arousal, had been drawn to his doorway.

Wikus scissored his legs shut, suddenly vulnerable.

The shadow lurked for a few moments more. Only when he heard Helen calling for him did Alexander leave.

In the darkness the stars spun overhead. Wikus felt the panicked lub of his heartbeat. What had Alexander heard? Had he sensed Wikus' yearning for another of his kind?

That impending-doom feeling came over him again. Wikus didn't try to touch himself again that night.

* * *

Sister Carrie didn't return until two days later.

A rainstorm had come over Jo'burg, shook the palm trees lining the ridiculous swimming pool, littered it with loose fronds. Pieter was given the task of fishing all the debris out, a task he clearly found demeaning. He'd been hired as a mercenary, not a pool boy.

Wikus watched through the balcony windows as Pieter threw the pool scoops and vacuum hoses around, foiled by yet another gust of wind.

Helen's voice carried from downstairs. "I didn't expect to see you here!"

"I just wanted to see how Wikus is doing." That was the Sister.

"People will talk," Helen said jokingly, but even now, after all these years, Wikus knew that Helen's humour was barbed.

Sister Carrie climbed the marble staircase to Wikus' room, shut the door after her.

"I thought you'd abandoned me," he said accusingly.

"You're not a prisoner."

Wikus huffed air out of his nose the same way Christopher did.

His expression did not escape the Sister. She smiled at him.

He hummed and hawed before Sister Carrie said, "You want to know how he's doing."

Wickus glared at her and nodded at the same time.

She shrugged. "He doesn't say much. He's been quiet."

"But he's okay?"

She tilted her head at Wikus, a little gesture picked up from working with prawns. "This is someone whose lover has left him. How do you expect him to be?"

"I'm not his _lover_!" Wikus blurted, and then, realizing his voice had carried, said again, "I'm not."

"So you are not. But you have involved him in the sort of emotional intimacies that he cannot hope to match with his own kind. You have shown him this, and taken it away from him."

Wikus was thunderstruck at Sister Carrie's revisionism. "I'll have you know, it was your idea to tell him how to fuck me."

"And your choice to continue."

"I had to! I'm fooking addicted."

"And you will stand here and tell me that all your interactions with him were completely businesslike, no more than a transaction?"

Wikus stared at her, wordlessly, wondering how she could know what he felt when he lay with Christopher.

She said softly, "I work with the prostitutes, the street-children, the battered wives. I see those to whom sex is a trade and a commodity, an act of loveless violence. I may have given up my life to a higher cause, but I know the difference. Wikus, it's time to wake up to yourself."

Cornered, Wikus rubbed his mouth, his hand through his hair.

"You never told me they had another Elite."

Sister Carrie put her hands in the pockets of her cardigan, a strangely defensive gesture.

"I didn't know." She stopped, frowned. The cross on her neck reflected the intermittent afternoon sun. "Well, I had an inkling. But I never thought Pro Forma would take a chance on bringing Alexander back to Johannesburg."

"Is this why you told me not to mention Christopher?"

"Things have changed quickly since Daniel Meinhof died. He founded Pro Forma, built it up to be an advocate to the Poleepkwa." Sister Carrie let out a sigh before continuing. "But I fear it may be sinking into yet another terrorist group. I hoped with all my heart that it was not, that Joel and the others would be sensible, but these kind of internal politics move quickly."

"Christopher's in trouble if they find out about him, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"Ah Jesus," he said, not caring that she was there. Gentle, solemn Christopher against the dead-eyed thing they kept in the house. He was aware for the first time how Christopher was not as tall as Alexander, was more scientist than fighter. Anxiety clenched his throat. He could barely breathe.

"I have to go back."

Sister Carrie raised an eyebrow at him. "What for?"

"I just have to."

He needed to see Christopher again. He needed to see for himself that he was okay. Just needed to, that was all.

"He's safer where he is, you know," said Sister Carrie. "Not even the NGOs go that deep into the District."

They were not able to talk further, as a tapping on the door brought Helen and her wheedling voice.

"Wikus? Joel needs to see you."

She was doing it on purpose. The doors in the house were solid timber, difficult to eavesdrop through (he had experimented), but he knew that Helen was not stupid. She would know that Sister Carrie and he were hiding something.

Joel only needed to take some more blood and skin samples.

"I'm sending this to a lab in Melbourne. You might have to wait a week."

"A week!"

"I'm sorry man, but Jo'burg doesn't have the kind of security we need to keep this shit quiet, okay? MNU are everywhere."

Wikus wasn't certain if MNU were the people he needed to watch out for. Twice that day he could have sworn Alexander looked at him, not in the dead-eyed way of an institutionalized alien, but as if appraising him, trying to ascertain his threat.

He needed to get away.

* * *

When the evening light had faded, a battered Land Rover pulled up outside the house. It was not the sort of vehicle one saw in a gated suburb like this. Something was going on.

They came in clattering and whispering, three men and a woman.

"There's no secrets here," said Joel, after they tried to take him aside into anothr room. "Talk."

Wikus stood at the doorway, arms folded, as a young woman outlined the news through deep breaths.

"MNU branch got bombed outside of Pretoria. Now the government's got involved, branded us as terrorists. We can't stay in the country."

_"What?!"_

She repeated the news, close to tears.

"Fuck! Fuck!" yelled Joel, and it was the first time Wikus had ever seen him upset. "Stupid idiots, what do they think they were doing?"

"It wasn't us," said a man with long hair who looked like he had wandered out of a Passion Play or a time machine. "But the Canadian branch, the provisionals..."

"There's a safe house in Lesotho," added the young woman. "We can be across the border before morning."

Both Joel and Helen looked at Wikus.

A quick, obstinate decision formed in him.

"No," he said. "I'm going back to the District. You can find me through Sister Carrie."

"You should stay with us," said Joel. "Things are going to be hot for a while."

"My family are here," said Wikus. "What if you cant stay in Lesotho? If you can't stay there, there where do you go? A boat out of South Africa? Back to the US? I'm not leaving my country."

Joel might have agreed, but it was Helen who cornered him as he packed away some of the meagre belongings he had gathered during his stay.

"What is it? What is so important that you can't join us?"

"I told you," he said, "my family are here." His voice sounded whiny, even to himself.

"The family that disowned you! Who think you are dead!"

One of the Pro Forma girls had given him a suitcase full of clothes and a brick of soap, knowing perhaps, what it was like to live on the outskirts of society. To this he added what was left of the money he'd managed to draw out of his account before MNU had closed it, some toiletries, a dozen cans of expensive cat food.

It was these that made Helen look twice. She picked up a can.

"You're going back to District Nine."

He took the can out of her hands, dropped it in the suitcase, and zipped up.

"I'm hiding, all right. It's the only place MNU can't reach."

"What have you got there? You fucking someone there, is that it? Some little girl, some kid you rent for a wink and a bottle of fire water?"

Helen was too close to the truth. He looked aside.

Helen laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. "I thought so. You men. All the same."

"You should get back to Alexander, Helen."

"Oh," she exclaimed. "Is that it now? Jealous of a Poleepkwa now? He's better than any human man, you know that. A noble example of his species."

"Goodbye Helen."

His past was slipping away from him. Funny how his thoughts of Helen no longer bothered him, as if a burr had been sanded down. She had only been a thoughtless teenager, introduced too early to the manifestations of sex, not conversant with its mysteries.

He did not have to wait for Sister Carrie. The nun was already parked in a white bakkie outside. She had heard the news on the radio, she told him, knew straight away what had happened.

Joel held open the door, shook his hand.

"Hey man, I'll be in touch. I've got a lot of hopes riding on your DNA."

Wikus nodded.

"Thanks for everything."

"Take care."

Sister Carrie drove the car through near empty streets. A few domestic ladies were heading out to their early-morning jobs, and the night shift workers were heading home, but the streets had fallen into the slow rhythm of the pre-dawn.

Wikus didn't know that he was tapping the side of the door in agitation until Sister Carrie alerted him to it.

"Easy, dear," she said. "He's still there."

"I wasn't thinking about him."

Sister Carrie gave him a look.

"When we get back, you're going to spend a few days in the clinic. Joel is a sweetheart, and Helen's more involved with Alexander to care, but I don't want anyone tracing you to Pro Forma, or to Christopher."

"You mean I can't see him."

"I mean, I want to be certain we aren't being followed."

"Fook." He threw his head against the head-rest. His body ached. He was all wound up inside. He wanted release.

He wanted Christopher. He wanted to work these fractured emotions out.

Wikus expected Sister Carrie to say something about his mood, but she declined to speak, instead concentrating on the narrowing streets of the Soweto suburb that bordered the District.

The radio chattered about the MNU explosion. Nobody from Pro Forma had stepped forward to claim responsibility yet, knowing perhaps that their cells needed time to regroup and hide.

The guards at the District watch house barely looked at them, especially with the UN logo plastered on the bakkie's doors.

"I borrowed it," said Sister Carrie, "There's a pool now. Everyone uses everyone else's vehicle. We've become a regular commune."

Sister Carrie's clinic looked a little lonely without the line of women coming for their children's health checkups. They normally stood outside afterwards, gossiping. A hand painted sign on a concrete wall read: _Teach one woman, teach a whole village._

As they drove closer, a man was walking down the road with a small person in his arms. His face was lit by the security lights.

"Oh my god," Sister Carrie smashed her foot down on the brakes. The vehicle fish-tailed a little in the dirt. "It's Mbube."

Mbube? Ntozake's pimp. Pins and needless washed over him, and settled in his toes.

Mbube was yelling, "That prawn, he took off her arm..."

He couldn't quite see. The Sister was trying to inspect the bundle that Mbube carried.

"No police! No police!" Mbube was saying.

"Come into my clinic, let's just see what we can do."

Feeling abandoned, Wikus sat in the bakkie for several minutes before sneaking out.

Mbube sat in the clinic's drab waiting room, head in his hands.

"Obesandjo is going to kill me, he'll find me, make me dead."

From the examination room Sister Carrie's voice was sharp-edged with her opinion on the whole matter. "You sold one of Obesandjo's girls to a Poleepkwa you barely knew?"

"He wanted her. Gave me one of their weapons."

Sister Carrie _tsked_. More likely that Mbube had found himself a new client and forced the kid onto the creature. A dumb prawn would forget humans didn't have exoskeletons, injure by accident.

Wikus sat down on one of the rusting metal chairs. Mbube looked at him suspiciously at first, then smiled when he saw Wikus' prawn hand peeping from beneath his sleeve.

"You're the _umlungu_ that was fucking the InDuna prawn, _ja_?"

Like many people too used to despair, Mbube found that the easiest way to mitigate it, was to dole it out to someone else. His eyes glittered meanly.

The girl Mbube had brought had woken up and was moaning piteously. It wasn't Ntozake, Wikus realised.

"Easy now," Sister Carrie was saying, "I'm just going to stitch up your wound, and you'll be as right as rain."

Mbube seemed more interested in Wikus now, than the child he'd brought in.

"He has grown tired of white meat, has he? Your InDuna prawn?"

Something in the tone of Mbube's voice warned Wikus. He knew when he was being ridiculed.

"What are you talking about?"

"He pays well, your InDuna. Doesn't hurt my girls when he fucks them. He has discovered that dark honey is sweeter than light." Mbube leant forward. "Nobody will look after you now."

All of a sudden he understood what the pimp was trying to say. When he opened his mouth, an incredulous squeak came out.

"You're lying," Wikus almost laughed at the absurdity of it. "Christopher wouldn't pay for a prostitute..."

The mean glitter was replaced by the same flat look Alexander made his own. "Go ask Ntozake, if you disbelieve me. Go ask the others. But disrespect me again, and I will cut your arm off."

* * *

She couldn't chase after him, not halfway through stitching a girl back together. Wikus abandoned any thought of waiting for a day, of careful reintegration to the District.

He ran into the grey streets, and was reminded of the first time he had taken flight here, running from MNU, his body burning, burning, his trust broken, his heart broken, a fugitive.

He thought of Tania and her MNU lover, he thought of pain and hellfire, of shame and anger.

It took him the best part of an hour to get in deep enough. When he came upon Christopher's shack the door was locked, and he pounded on it like a madman.

"Come out here you fooking creature, get out here!"

When the door opened it was not Christopher.

Ntozake stood there, wiping sleep from her eyes. She was wearing a blouse patterned with peacock feathers. A little too big, it fell suggestively off one shoulder, exposed a breast. A gorge of jealousy rose up in him.

_Maybe your InDuna will take me, if you do not wish to have him._

So what Mbube had said was true.

"How long have you been here? With him?"

She gave him a teenage look, d_uh, stupid white man! _"Since you left."

Wikus slammed the door frame with his hand and could not speak. It was as if the world had suddenly collapsed around him.

He was aware of Christopher coming up behind Ntozake, touching her on the shoulder and asking her to go back inside.

"Wikus..." Christopher's phonetic gurgle of his name seemed to come from a distance. "I did not expect you back."

"_Fook you!"_ He meant to yell at Christopher, but it came out strangled. "Fook you, I fooken let you touch me, I fooken let you put your thing in me..."

"Do you not trade each other in reproductive matters," said Christopher, refusing to be cowed. "Isn't that what is done among your kind?"

When the cry came out, his words were savage and thoughtless. "Fooking creature, have her then! I hated it every time you touch me, you disgust me!"

"Sweetie man?"

Now the fucking child was there in the doorway, antennae buzzing with anxiety, and he remembered Christopher's lies to his child about love and lovemaking and pleasure and it was all one sordid, rotten knot in his stomach.

Every confused and tender thought he'd had, every time he'd touched himself and thought of Christopher, all of it turned hateful and bitter. Wikus wanted to keel over and die from the shame, the shame that had haunted him all his life...

The outburst had woken up the other inhabitants of the street. Human and alien eyes watched his humiliation, watched him standing in front of the shack, cuckolded, not even able to hold the fucking sexual interest of a dirty, bottom dwelling prawn.

"Fook the lot of you, " he shouted, kicking an empty fuel can in a gesture of useless, impotent rage before storming off.

* * *

...

...

...

_To be continued..._

* * *


	8. Chapter 8

* * *

...

...

..

The recent rains had muddied the streets, or the alleys that passed for streets in the deep District and Wikus stomped through the puddles, shins stranded with plastic bags, not caring that he could wind up with tetanus, or hepatitis, or e-coli or a hundred different diseases.

Fuck them, he thought, fuck them both, fuck them all. But his eyes weren't focusing and his throat was as tight as if he'd garroted himself on his own esophagus.

A fitful rain began to fall, plastering his clothes to his skin. He supposed that the pain of change would be on him soon, but the pain was in all the wrong places now.

He climbed up a grassy hillside where the city lay out in the distance, and the mothership's great spiky shadow caught the highlights of the rising sun.

Wikus pressed his knuckle against his teeth. Flayed by self pity and his own hatefulness, he almost felt ready to give himself up. MNU could cut him to pieces now. He didn't care.

The sun slipped behind rain clouds. He waited there, his skin numbed to hard white. There was a footstep behind him, a slither on grass.

He turned to see Ntozake sliding down the wet grass. She had put a jacket on over her shoulders, and it had become sodden with rain. She wasn't wearing the too-heavy make-up she usually wore, and she looked ten years old, not fourteen.

"You'll catch cold, umlungu."

He didn't want to acknowledge her. She was like salt on a wound. He imagined Christopher lying with her and there were so many things wrong, that he was an alien, that she was a child, but the thought that hurt the most was that she had taken Christopher from him.

This moral dissonance. He was lost.

She sat next to him, looked out at the dead ship. He teeth clattered.

"Go away," he said. The sound barely registered above the wind on the hillside

Ntozake peered at him. "You jealous of me, umlungu? Is that it?"

She was just a child. He couldn't yell at her, or hit her, or express the frustrations burning in his belly.

"But you said you didn't want him," Ntozake went on. "You said it was a contract."

"I fooking know what I said!"

Wikus stood up, and his legs went into a cramp from having been stuck in the same position for hours, and he fell over.

Ntozake did not laugh at him rolling around in the grass, trying to find purchase in the mud and blades. Finally Wikus rolled onto his stomach, defeated.

"Christopher did not want me to come out here after you," she said regally. "He was angry you had come back. Angry and upset." Cunning little glance. Like Mbube she wanted to rub his despair in deeper. "Perhaps if he was human he would cry."

"Why don't you comfort him then?" he spat savagely.

"I wasn't the one who left him." She sniffed. "You deserve everything you get." She stood up. "Besides, it's much nicer being with a Poleepkwa. Their little-littles, not like a man."

Ntozake wiggled her little finger, before walking off.

Wikus lay here. _Little-littles_. An ant was crawling up a grass stalk, centimeters from his face.

* * *

By the time he managed to stumble into the UN compound - and he wouldn't have been let through the front gates in his condition if it wasn't for his accent and his skin - Sister Carrie was almost hysterical.

"Dear lord, I thought you'd been taken. When you ran off like that I was certain you'd been stolen out of the truck. And you're _freezing_. Oh, get out of those clothes..."

"Why didn't you tell me Christopher's with Ntozake?"

She frowned. "He is? He's said nothing to me."

"He's fucking one of Mbube's girls!"

Sister Carrie looked genuinely surprised, and not just from his language. "Wikus, I'm sure you're not thinking right. The weather has gone to your head."

"I went to his shack. She was there, half fooking naked..."

Her expression told him that she wasn't quite convinced. "Ntozake? The girl?"

"Yes!"

"Get changed. I won't talk to you until you're not dying of hypothermia."

Afterwards she made him eat, and listened to his story about what Mbube had said, going to Christopher's shack.

"It just..." he started. "I wasn't ready to see that. I was only trying to understand my own experience, not to be demeaned like that."

"There's only one problem, Wikus," she said. "Poleepkwa have both male and female characteristics. They're hermaphrodites. But an Elite, and you know this yourself, have an extra body part."

"So?"

"We aren't talking a human penis, dear. I've seen enough of Alexander now to understand what I first suspected. It is an organ of trauma and coercion, to impregnate a Queen. An Elite could cause some serious damage to a human if they decided to have intercourse with them. So whatever Christopher and Ntozake's relationship is, they're not having sex."

"He said he was using her in reproductive matters!"

"Wikus, you'll just have to be an adult and flat-out ask him what he meant."

Whatever tatters of respect he had left, he clutched them close. "I don't want to go back. I'm not crawling back to him."

"Then don't. He's due for a shift here in, oh, about two hours. You can ask him then."

* * *

Sick with anxiety, Wikus waited. The gossiping women came and went.

_Little-littles._

He'd been too muddled with grief and cold to think about Ntozake's passing comment, but now it echoed in his mind. Little-little, when Christopher certainly wasn't.

After a long while of pacing the balcony and swallowing several cups of milky rooibos tea, he heard the soft click-speak that could only come from Christopher. Wikus bit his lip, tried to flatten down his hair, suddenly wished he'd shaved maybe, even though Christopher had seen him at his very, very worst.

The tied to quash them down, these little cues to romance with women, prepared himself for a confrontation. To yell and shout if need be, not go into this a victim.

But when he walked into the clinic, saw Christopher slung into a white cotton gown in some deference to the medical profession and human custom, his fight left him and he could only stand in the threshold, wordless, all the old vulnerabilities and hurts of his life dredged up.

It hurt to swallow.

"I will be with you in a moment," said Christopher, and those huge, expressive eyes of his swum with deep and terrible emotions.

Wikus retreated into the waiting room, sat on the hard chair, his hands clasping and unclasping, hearing the laughter of children, the solemn thank yous of their parents, Sister Carrie's calm voice carrying from outside.

A young boy tugged on his arm.

"He says you can go in, now."

Wikus looked at the African child. How small he was, whether by malnutrition or genetics he could not know, but he had a crinkled, wise face, like a little old man.

Wikus walked into the medical room. Christopher was quietly cleaning up the vaccines and test instruments.

"I... I want to apologise for this morning," Wikus said. "I was tired. I said things I shouldn't have."

"You only spoke the truth."

"I was fooking upset, alright? I was fooking..." He gasped for air, and the words slipped out. "I was jealous."

Christopher turned aside, as if Wikus' admission was of no consequence.

A quick anger flared in him. Hadn't Christopher understood how difficult it was to admit sexual jealousy, especially of something so taboo as inter-species sex? Couldn't Christopher tell his limbs and chest and were locked up and aching, as if he'd shouldered a weight beyond his strength?

"You said you were using her in fooking reproduction! You expect me to just take that? To just accept that like it's nothing? Like I was that replaceable?"

"You sell each other in matters of reproduction." Christopher replied quietly. "She can look after my child. Is that not also part of the reproductive process?"

Wikus opened his mouth and shut it again.

"She looks after your kid?"

"I have to go further to find the fluid, places that are dangerous. I cannot take him. But I give Mbube some of what I find, his contract extends to areas of reproduction."

He was dumbfounded. _You're such a man_. Reproduction. He had only thought of sex, where a parent thought of all the work that went after the sex act, from birthing to raising...

Ntozake was the fucking babysitter.

He wanted to laugh. A vaulting joy went though him, so intense he almost sobbed from it.

"You haven't...you haven't...been with her, the way you are with me."

Christopher turned to him the, and the hard look stilled his relief. "No. She is a child."

And like a decaying building ready to topple on it, his memory came back.

_You disgust me._

"Christopher, oh god, Christopher, I'm such an idiot. I saw you and I thought the worst."

Wikus felt like a worm. He wanted to fall onto the floor and beg.

But Christopher only continued his cleaning duties.

"No," said Christopher. "I was the ignorant one. I wanted more than you are able to give. I committed the trespass of longing for that I cannot have."

Wikus had to jump in front of Christopher, wanted him to stop talking with such finality. His arms twitched. He needed to clutch Christopher's hard body to him, wreck himself upon those shores.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, don't you understand, I was thoughtless, I shouldn't have said what I said!"

Christopher stopped. His hand reached out, and Wikus moved to fall into his embrace, had to push forward and reach his face into Christopher's labrum and mandibles. He wanted to taste their damp salt on his tongue, cry forgiveness, but Christopher pushed Wikus back before he could come close.

"Please go," Christopher said, "You have hurt me enough."

Wikus stood back, gasping as if he'd been hit in the chest.

"Chris..."

"Please," said Christopher, not looking at him. The secondary limbs were drawn in tight against his chest. Christopher had never looked so harrowed, even when Koobus had beaten him.

Wikus' knees trembled. He could have been knocked over with a breath.

Christopher walked away from him, and Ntozake's voice echoed in the empty room.

_You deserve everything you get._

_..._

_..._

_..._

* * *

_To Be Continued..._

* * *


	9. Chapter 9

* * *

"Welfare checks", they called it, when every so often MNU used to go into the District, but in reality their only welfare check was for the guns and technology spirited down from the mothership twenty years before.

The relocation of aliens to the District had been so rushed and haphazard, nearly all the removable items had been pilfered from the Mothership before MNU realised it was missing.

Where had the newcomers gotten the sense to bring down as much of their technology as they could lay a hand on? Poleepkwa barely knew what their weapons did. Exobiologists suggested that it was a trained response, a evacuation strategy.

But some scientists, noticeably those of the entomological fields, supposed that one - maybe more but definitely one - individual had given an executive command to clear out the stores and hide them away.

Elite caste or none, MNU still made their sorties into the District. During this time there were deaths on both sides, and the District became like a war zone. No moving around. No getting in and out. No trying to find Christopher and making up for his rotten human words.

Wikus spent the time trapped on the upper floor of the Sister's concrete quarters in the NGO camp, wracked with concern. Day and night, the District remained clouded in a haze of smoke. Dozens of Poleepkwa bodies were removed through the gates, tagged and catalogued. The bullets made a popping sound for hours, echoed off the hillside.

Sister Carrie came to the door on the last night of the campaign, knocked on it softly.

"Wikus?"

He was sitting on the iron bed, absently flicking through old Reader's Digests from the nineteen eighties.

He almost didn't answer.

"Wikus," she said again.

Finally he responded, and age had crpt up on her, a hundred sorrows, from all the warzones in the world that she had been.

"There's been a firefight in the deep District."

He'd known. He could hear the gunfight, traced their progress through the different enclaves by the sound in new ears. His fingers clutched the steel frame in the doorway. His body had become insubstantial. He prepared himself for the worst.

She would not have come to him like this if it wasn't important.

"Christopher?" It hurt to say his name.

"We don't know yet. But several people were killed." Deep breath. "Including one the others identified as the InDuna."

How odd, that he felt nothing at first. Just a numbness in his extremities, as if he'd been snap-frozen.

"Are you sure?" He wanted to reach forward, shake her. Had to restrain himself, had to restrain his rebooting nerves from jumping and misfiring.

"MNU have taken the body back to their lab for examination, as an Elite. There was a Polaroid taken, one of those self-developing pictures. It was shown to me. The body had Christopher's jacket."

"Oh."

He said no more. She caught him as he staggered forward on weak knees, and he clutched her close in grief, her tiny bird bones no equal to Christopher's great strength, but he needed closeness anyway.

"I know it's hard," she said over the rattle of his breath. "I know you battled with your feelings for him."

"I need to get back there."

"You can't. MNU have withdrawn, but the Poleepkwa are angry. They'd kill anyone who looked like MNU. Including you, Wikus."

Wikus' thoughts turned to Christopher Junior. Would Ntozake look after him? Or would she return to her world of child slavery and prostitution?"

No. He needed to make certain that both children were alright. It was his duty as Christopher's friend, and he was still Christopher's friend.

Only when Sister Carrie left him alone did he let himself mourn, press his hands, alien and human, to his face.

Only then.

* * *

The anger smelt like bitterness and blood. Wikus loaded a change of clothes into a satchel, scaled the fence, and headed off into the smoked-out streets of District Nine.

The damage that MNU had done was not so visible in the general squalor of the slum, but there was no mistaking the places where they had deployed and activated, the doors lolling open like thirsty tongues, the half-destroyed shacks.

He ignored the indignant stares from the aliens at the UN boundaries and headed in deep, to where the intermittent human culture sloughed away and the Poleepkwa one came out. Writings on the walls were less human, more alien, moved from despair to anger, passed from plaintive requests for freedom to open threats.

A prawn faced him off in a street corner. His red flanks were scored from a beating.

"Human. We don't want you here."

Wikus rolled up his sleeve, displayed his arm.

"I'm like you," he said.

The average prawn was still kind of stupid. While the creature thought about it, Wikus strode on past him.

His grief had poured steel into places where he thought he had none. It was not confirmed, and for all he knew Christopher was still alive. But the thought, the thought of Christopher dying when he had not explained, not apologized, that thought wounded him past his newly smelted strength.

Perhaps this was the instinct that kept him going. Perhaps this was the pheromone he emitted, of the alien searching for the lost Elite.

Christopher's shack was a ruin.

Ruined, yes, but only insubstantially. The hidden ship was still intact.

He went from hut to hut, found them empty if he was lucky. The bodies still rotted outside.

He came across a blue Prawn rooting for food in a garbage dump, cried, "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Your elite, your... InDuna."

The creature looked at him. "Dead," he clicked. Such a final sound. "Dead."

"What about his son? The girl, the human girl?"

"They've gone."

"Where, damn you!"

Christopher's eyes had been so different, they swum with deep knowledge that this one didn't have, but in that moment he couldn't bear to look at the alien's ugly-soulful face and be reminded of Christopher. He had to find Ntozake and the little bug, could not approach that terrible place in his mind, the one where Christopher was dead, where Wikus had not made his peace with him.

To go there was to be gutted, and he needed to stay strong.

"Try near the camp," said the alien, losing interest. "Where the humans are."

Wikus scraped his hair back with his real hand, a gesture of defeat. "The fooking witch doctors? They'll eat the kid!"

But the prawn was gone back to rooting in a nearby abandoned shack for scraps.

Wikus was momentarily frozen. To go near the districts human settlements was to risk life and limb, he was a chimera of all that was hateful to them.

Then he thought of Christopher and there were no more doubts.

* * *

He could find the human settlement with his eyes shut. There was the constant gunfire, desultory pop-pops like backfiring cars. And then there was the smell, the smoke and the garbage, and the odd human fecal reek from open sewers. Poleepkwa were very fastidious about their voiding, so to have one piss or vomit near you was an utterly obscene act, far worse than a human doing it.

As he continued his mad, suicidal stumble into the settlement he heard voices, that familiar patter of Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Bantu, and even the odd alien loan-word clicking in there too.

He fell past a row of wet shirts hung out to dry and into a clearing amidst the slums. A small boy was pumping water from an iron pipe into a concrete reservoir. A pair of girls were washing in it, and squealed angrily when he came upon them. They were no older than Ntozake, and his first thought was a horrid one - they would more likely end up in the same way as her.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"Get out of here umlungu!" shouted an older woman from a doorway, seeing him. "You want to get killed?"

She threw down her washing and approached Wikus fearlessly. "You come peeping at young girls? I won't allow it."

"Please," he said, wait, I'm looking for someone."

"You won't find it here."

She was a mother or an auntie of great status and respect, and the girls dressed quickly behind her, terrified of this crazy white man with the skin condition and the great bandaged leper's hand.

"I'm looking for... a girl, about fourteen. Ntozake. And a little prawn, a poleepkwa!"

She was about to yell again, then stopped, and gave him a sideways look.

"You the one called Wikus?"

Christ, did everyone in the fucking district know who he was? "Yes, yes."

"Thobekile! Show the man where the InDuna is."

"Wait, what?" Wikus was startled.

The young girl looked at him sullenly, said, "This way."

Wikus was torn up. What were they talking about? Christopher was dead.

He wanted to yell at her, tell her to hurry up, but she meandered through the tight-packed huts, and slowed to talk to the several settlement-folk who spoke to her. For all that a slum was a slum, the community was tight. He thought of Pro Forma, hiding in their huge house in a gated suburb, the neighbours unaware that an almost-terrorist group lived next door.

That could never happen here.

Thobekile pointed at a nondescript shack with a bright-painted red and green striped door. Bob Marley's face was fading on the surface, painted there by a previous resident, or pilfered from a larger building.

Christopher Junior sat in the dust with a group of human children, tossing knucklebones into a ring.

"Hey kid, CJ, hey," Wikus croaked, so relieved to see him he wanted to pick the little creature up and hug him.

"Sweetie man!" CJ stood up, briefly. But the memory of their last meeting was too strong. The kid withdrew, uncertain. The other children only stared balefully at the umlungu in their midst.

His panic made his voice high-pitched, as if he was being strangled.

"Your dad, where's your dad?"

"In there," said Christopher Junior, and went back to a very solemn game of knucklebones.

Wikus would have broken down the door if it did any more than resist the first few pushes. But slum housing is not meant to be secure, everyone owns everything and nothing.

In the dim centre of the shack Ntozake turned to him.

She was kneeling by a basin of water rinsing a wad of cloth. Christopher was lying on a low bed, asleep, back to the door. Even in the low light Wikus could see the lashes across his back, and he remembered a torture device he'd confiscated from one of the MNU soldiers once, a long barbed chain on a handle, bristling with hooks and spikes, a primitively medieval thing.

Christopher's exoskeleton had not caught the worst of it, but gouges had been ripped into a shoulder, along the serrations of his back.

"Why are you here," said Ntozake, in a low angry voice.

Christopher pulled himself up to a sitting position painfully, but would not turn to look at Wikus. The old grey sheets were stained with Christopher's blood.

Wikus wanted to run to him, but everything that had gone between them loomed up like a terrible wall. He stayed at the door.

"I thought you were dead."

"I am not."

"You should... you should see the Sister for those wounds." What was he saying? Christopher back from the dead and Wikus speaking this way?

"They will heal," Christopher said. "But I let another one of my people die in my place. I have been a coward. I have not been a leader."

"So, now you sit here in your own self pity," Wikus said, a stab of impatience at his own buttoned-down inability to display his feelings. "Letting everyone who cares about you think that you've gone?"

Christopher turned to look at Wikus now, and Wikus had to catch a breath, could not say what he wanted to say, _I wept for you, you fooking creature, I fooking got on my fooking knees and cried,_ could not cross the room for him, could not.

Christopher saw his he situation. Christopher saw everything in him, the way he was too wrapped up in his humanness and could never give Christopher the love he'd never had and so desperately needed.

Then he turned away, dismissively. "I will tell the Sister tomorrow."

Wikus slammed the door on the way out. "Fook you," he said to the empty air, "Fooking creature, fooking prawn."

Every time he saw Christopher is was ending like this, in curses. He'd never felt like this about another living thing, never, as if everything his father had wanted him to be, a strong man, a real man was dashed on the man he'd become, an officious little bastard working for a company that only used the newcomers for their own ends.

His prawn body ached for Christopher. His real body ached for Christopher. It was almost as bad as if Christopher had died. His eyes stung. From the noonday sun, the thought, the dust.

Fuck you Christopher, he thought. Fuck you.

* * *

He'd never seen Sister Carrie angry, but she was angry enough when he came back.

"I thought I'd lost you! How could you do that to me?"

It was only hunger that had brought him back, and he devoured a can of cold spaghetti and meatballs with the same sullen look Thobekile gave him.

After leaving the settlement, he'd returned to Christopher's shack. Some kind of instinct had drawn him to secure the place, make it less attractive for looters who might desperately want 386 motherboards or old VGA monitors.

He could not look at the sleeping pad without thinking of what had taken place on it. He slept in a lean-to of galvanized iron.

But there was no food nearby, and the dust and smoke had contaminated the rainwater catchments. This part of the deep district wasn't hooked into the city's water supply.

After three days, hunger and thirst drove him back to the NGO camp and Sister Carrie.

He paused eating just long enough to mumble, "Christopher's alive."

She nodded. "I know. I was just as mad as him when he showed up. Honestly, the pair of you."

"He was hurt."

"They heal quickly." She gave him a look over her coffee mg. "Which I'm certain you've noticed during your time in MNU."

The food didn't seem quite so appetizing now, not with the guilty lump in his stomach. Yes, he knew there were biological quirks in the aliens that were of great interest to pharmaceutical companies. Yes, there were floors in MNU dedicated to finding those secrets out.

A horn tooted outside.

Annoyed, Sister Carrie raised her head to look out the tiny window. "For goodness sake, I told the UN gentleman I needed the bakkie tomorrow, not today. Wait here love."

He stood in the kitchen and finished the can. In the sheen of an autoclave on the kitchen bench, Wikus could see himself a wreck, a three day growth of beard, his once neat hair a shag.

As he was poking around in the prefab shelving for something more edible, Sister Carrie ran back inside.

"Oh, oh Wikus," she hissed.

"What's wrong?" All his human hairs were prickling. "Sister?"

She did not answer him. She did not need to. A slender blonde woman stepped in after her.

"Wikus."

She was so unexpected, seeing her was like being slapped.

"Ah. Helen."

Helen looked exhausted since Wikus had seen her last. There was a hard edge to her thin lips.

"I thought you were in Namibia or something?"

"Clearly somewhere better than you, Wikus," she said acidly, looking him up and down. "Is that supposed to be some sort of disguise?"

Sister Carrie stayed behind Helen, pulling odd and strained faces. Over her shoulder, out the window, Pieter was lurking next to the obviously stolen UN truck, his eyes permanently squinting and suspicious.

"Wikus is going to take a shower and get himself cleaned up." Sister Carrie's voice had the bluntness of an order. "Aren't you Wikus? Why don't you use the one in _MY ROOM."_

Wikus was about to frown, "But..."

"Go _ON_ then, and if you see Emanuel, tell him _not to disturb us_, we have guests."

The air was electric. And with a gut-punch Wikus realised what was going on. Christopher was here. Helen was here. If Helen found out about Christopher then Alexander would...

"Right," he said. "I'll catch you down here."

He climbed the concrete stairs, cursing to himself.

Christopher was sitting, cross-legged on the floor, peering into a laptop that could only been pilfered from one of the American NGOs. It was one of those bright-coloured ones that looked like a square of bright neon, next year's model.

He was so intent on the contents of the screen, Christopher only looked up when Wikus closed the door.

A moment of measureless emotion, then Christopher clicked in annoyance. He scratched the shiny scar on his shoulder, where the exoskeleton had re-knit over his injury.

"I told the Sister not to tell you I was here."

"She didn't."

Christopher's mandibles beat the air in an agitated tattoo. Whatever was on the laptop was forgotten now.

"You look better," Wikus said. "Your shoulder. Your back."

"We heal quickly," said Christopher. "From our _external_ injuries."

_Fuck,_ Wikus thought bitterly_. Just rub it in why don't you?_

Christopher stood up, closed the laptop. "I'd better go."

"That's not a good idea."

"Why not?"

"There's a pair of Pro Forma operatives downstairs who she'd rather not let know you're here. They'll see you."

When it sounded like he gave too much of a fuck, Wikus added, "But go. See if I care. I'm going to take a fooking shower, otherwise they'll get suspicious and you'll be fooked."

His vehemence surprised even him. But he was not himself around this tall, silent creature, not himself and he hated it.

Wikus yanked off his dirty clothes. Christopher had seen him naked a dozen times, yet a curious thrill ran over Wikus, like stripping in front of a stranger. There had never been this layer of meaning between them. Before, they had been just fucking. Less that fucking. Scratching an itch even.

Christopher watched him with an almost brutal silence, like a tethered animal.

_Yeah, you go and look_, Wikus thought.

In the small shower well, the dust of the days he'd spent away coursed off him, and Wikus found that when he lathered himself up his skin was especially sensitive, and the water was warm and his new nether regions were tight and tingling.

He wanted to punish Christopher for all this turmoil, for making him feel guilty and cruel. He moved his hands over his soapy body, didn't bother to draw the curtain.

Christopher wasn't stupid. He knew that Wikus was goading him, his forbidden human body, here in this room

Soon the water ran cold, and he stepped out, wrapped a towel around his waist. He tried not to drip water over the handmade Kurdish rug, a gift Sister Carrie had received during a stay in Iraq, two hundred years old and almost priceless.

His clothes were filthy. There was no way he could put them on again.

"Shit," he said. "What am I supposed to wear?"

"I will tell Sister--" started Christopher.

"No, you stay here. I'll walk the fooking gauntlet."

Christopher tilted his head at the bright laptop. "So Sister Carrie said that I need to keep my distance from Pro Forma," said Christopher. "But I cannot understand why. From what I've read on the internet, they want to help us." He was trying not to look at Wikus. "We may be here for a long time if I cannot activate my ship."

"She has her reasons."

"But I have mine," said Christopher. "I will see them."

He moved for the door. Wikus slid in front of him.

"No! How many times do I have to tell you?"

"Are you going to stop me?" His face was close, that startling alien face.

"You think I can't?" A mad feeling ran through him. He lifted his arms. The towel fell from his hips.

Christopher's breath was one of utter despair and surrender. The hands that game up did not touch him, but pressed the door on either side of his shoulders.

"Why do you do this," Christopher's clicks were wrenched and tormented. "When you hate me so?"

"I was angry, all right?"

But he couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't say what he felt. His tongue was a stone. There was too much between them. He gripped the coat rack above his head. How easier it was to be physically intimate than emotionally so. Much less complicated.

"Touch me."

Christopher almost did. Almost. All of his strength was in keeping his hands away from Wikus. So this is what it is like, thought Wikus, to be hungered for and yearned after.

He took Christopher's hands, placed them on his chest, moverd them down over his stomach. Christopher jerked away, said something in a higher dialect of poleepkwa, something translated as, '_one should not take joy where one does not give joy...'_

Careless with desire, Wikus pushed forward, wasn't quite tall enough to reach Christopher's mouth, but ran his lips along Christopher's throat, to where the exoskeleton gave way to damp flesh.

Christopher pulled away again. "Stop."

A hot, useless rush of indignant guilt rose up in him.

"What? Because of what I said? Because I'm a stupid fooking human?"

"And yet it was said."

"All right, eh?" Wikus spat, "All right, I said it and meant it. I said it because I wanted to hurt you, I wanted you to hurt as much as it hurt me when I saw you with Ntozake and I thought you were fooking her. It made me so fooking... _mad_."

Christopher was being imperious, and purposefully obtuse. "Why should it matter to you?"

"Fook, fook you're dense!"

He knew he should just give up. He was useless when he came to love. Tania had been an angel in more ways than one.

"I'm fooking in love with you," shouted Wikus, "dear fooking god. A fooking creature, a fooking alien, and I'm married, but _you_, Jesus Christ, how could you understand how hard it is for me--"

Again, he'd dug the grave of this liaison deeper, because who else could understand the pain of loving someone so different from oneself than Christopher?

If he'd wanted Christopher to respond to him, to say yes, yes, I love you too, he would have been disappointed. But the truth was, he didn't know what to expect from Christopher. Christopher wasn't even human. Christopher's silence wasn't unexpected.

What was unexpected was Christopher's blunt clicks. "You lie."

Wikus had never in his life been so confronted with his fears and his affections, he never felt so raw than he did now, confessing a mortal sin and having it dashed away. Christ on the cross looked down at him from a high wall over the Sister's bed, crying over his iniquities, his trespasses against humankind. To like with an alien was worse than to lie with a man or a beast.

Disoriented by his own need he shuffled forward, pressed his mouth to the junction at Christopher's throat and sternum, and breathed against him.

Christopher stilled, as if caught in a moment between startled and scared.

"You must not..." murmured Christopher, as much to himself as to Wikus. "You do not know what you are saying."

"Shut up," Wikus groaned, and he began to kiss lower.

Christopher's belly was as hard as that of a marble altar. He could have been praying to a thoughtless, unfeeling god.

Without warning, Christopher grabbed Wikus by his arms, and he almost thought he'd been thrown aside, but he landed on the hard narrow bed, and Christopher was on top of him, breath steaming out of his gills, exoskeleton rasping against Wikus' bare skin.

Christopher's complex mouth followed over the tender grazes, Wikus arched and groaned into that contact, Helen forgotten, Pro Forma forgotten, only his skin and his breath and Christopher's body.

Wikus pulled Christopher's face to him, tongued his way past the labrum, lost himself in Christopher's salty, oceanic taste. Poleepkwa didn't have the oral fixations humans did, but Christopher made his summertime noise all the same, sliding his hips in between Wikus' naked thighs.

"Jesus," groaned Wikus," I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry about everything..." He caressed Christopher's scars with shaking fingers, traced their soft edges, knew the importance of the moment, wanting to be forgiven for all the wrong and thoughtless things he'd done.

Christopher nibbled at his shoulder, his neck, trilling with relief and delight. Wikus looked up at the crucifix, at the face staring down at him. They were going to fuck on a nun's bed.

Or maybe not, for Christopher backed off again. "Wait..."

"What the fook!" Wikus sat up, stinking of thwarted sexual arousal. "You can't do this to me now."

Christopher tilted his head, as if listening to a sound Wikus could not hear.

"There's something... someone... "

"Right now I wouldn't care if it was fooking Nelson Mandela," Wikus said, reaching for Christopher's hip. The exoskeleton was retracted and shining, and Wikus wanted to taste there, tease out Christopher's thing, show Christopher that the human ways could be good too.

He wet his human thumb in his mouth, then drew it down a silvery edge. Christopher let out an "Ak!" sound, making Wikus grin madly.

"Oh, so you liked that?" He pushed Christopher's belly. "Roll over."

Christopher hesitated, then shifted around on the narrow bed. Wikus knelt between Christopher's thighs, anxious excitement making his skin jump and twitch. He'd never quite captured the niceties of oral sex, and now he was going to have to introduce a non-human to it without messing him up.

Christopher's hand brushed along Wikus' forearm, as if to tell him it would be all right, and Wikus kissed the connective tissue between the cloacal ridges before sliding a tongue along the groove.

Christopher only let out a breath.

There was such a intense, organic taste to Christopher's arousal, you would never call it pleasant, and it was not just the taste of him but the emotional triggers, all those uncertain biochemical switches lighting up in his bran. He could feel the tip of Christopher's thing, still sheathed in bone, went to coax it out...

Until a sharp rapping on the door interrupted them, and Wikus bit back some choice words.

Sister Carrie's voice rattled through the door, "_Wikus, I brought you some clothes_."

"Yeah," he said, "Uh, thanks. Leave them at the door."

Sister Carrie didn't leave. She continued, "_Helen and Alexander are wondering when you're coming back down_."

The wods hung, frozen. And Alexander.

There was no forgetting Alexander's cold yellow stare, and Wikus realised what it was that Christopher had just sensed. The other Elite, his ruined brother.

Wikus sat back on his haunches, his erection fading as if he'd been drenched in cold water.

"Shit," he groaned, scraping his hair off his sweating forehead. "I should have told you. They have an Elite, another InDuna."

He couldn't think about Alexander and Christopher without concern, and there was nothing remotely erotic in that.

"Is that his name?" clicked Christopher hopefully. "Alexander?"

"You must not meet him."

"Why? Wikus, I've been so alone."

What was this response in him, this sudden wrench? Wikus stared at the leaping joy in Christopher's face.

Wikus clenched his fists. He knew what that feeling was now. He was jealous.

"He'll kill you. They got him out of a fooking solitary confinement, MNU experimented on him. He's a bloody psycho."

"But we're the same. He is like me. He'll see reason beyond what has happened to him."

Wikus wiped Christopher's taste from his mouth, and winced. He pulled himself off the bed, and retrieved the damp towel.

"Look, not yet, all right? I'm not sure what these people want and--" he looked at the ground. "You've got a kid and two million of your own people to look after."

Christopher nodded, but Wikus could tell that his monster-lover had made up his own mind.

"Don't go too far though," blurted Wikus.

"I will return," said Christopher, then he did something that Wikus would never have allowed and he never would have dared before now, caught the back of Wikus' head and drew their faces together. As always, kissing Christopher was perplexing and exciting and strange, This was not some chance meeting of mouthparts during intercourse, but a real gesture of affection.

"I love you," mumbled Wikus. "It's the truth."

Christopher did not return the sentiment, and when he left, a yawning emptiness seemed to pull Wikus' bones apart. He watched as Christopher made his way out onto the balcony and cleared the railing.

The room was a vacuum without Christopher. The bedclothes were rumpled. His insides twanged and burnt. He wanted to be sick. Why was everything so difficult, even after he'd made his peace with Christopher? Why did even the colours appear too bright?

Wikus opened the door slightly to retrieve the shirt and jeans left just outside. He pulled them on, the seam tearing slightly to accommodate his alien hand, and in resignation padded downstairs.

* * *

**_[TBC]_**


	10. Chapter 10

.

.

.

The clothes that Sister Carrie had left for him still smelt faintly of two-stroke brush cutter fuel and burnt rubber. A pair of faded black Levis were a little too small and made him feel he'd be better suited on a street corner. Finally a worn but clean t-shirt advertised a Coca-Cola logo on the chest.

Downstairs in the tree-shaded yard, Wikus dumped his dirty gear in the zinc tub that served as a laundry. Too late he noticed Pieter leaning against the stolen UN bakkie, sucking insolently on a cigarette. Two butts had already been ground in the dirt near his toes. He did not speak to Wikus, only watched him with his bleached-blue stare.

Sister Carrie welcomed him into the kitchen with a a friendliness so fake it approached hysteria.

"Ah, they fit, oh, I totally didn't have anything for a man, it's usually the women and children I have to cater for."

"It's okay sister, I've lost some weight over the last couple of weeks, yeah?"

"Wikus dear, you were so thin already. You need to eat more."

He made promises to take care of himself, but all the while was aware of the two pairs of eyes, human and alien, watching him.

He didn't want to sit next to Alexander, but was forced to by the combined weight of their stares. Alexander was tasting the air around him, smelling Christopher, scenting the blush of pheromones on his skin.

Annoyed, he turned to Helen. "Why did you bring him here? It's no place for him."

"It's the second phase of Alexander's integration with his people," Helen said icily. "Soon he will establish himself as their Elite, and these humans--" she made a gesture about her, "--they will see where their power is then."

Sister Carrie frowned. "Helen, you aren't talking about... anything violent?"

Helen's face became chipped and flinty since Wikus had seen her last. It was the kind of face you saw on Most Wanted lists on the MNU bulletin walls.

"Twenty years these creatures have suffered. Now we will free them."

Wikus glanced at Alexander. The alien looked as if he couldn't care less about humans or poleepkwa. In fact, he almost looked as if he'd be the kind that would lead an orgy of destruction and suicide merely as a distraction from boredom, then walk away as unmoved as if nothing had happened.

At that moment Joel came in, sweating. He pushed a large cardboard box on the table. "That's the best of the black-market anti-retrovirals, you won't find any of this stuff outside of the US, I'll tell you that."

Wikus looked over the box to where Sister Carrie sat, and saw her conflict. He'd wondered before why she was so invested in Pro-Forma, and knew all of a sudden the Faustian bargains she had made.

* * *

Emanuel was attacking a stubborn thicket with the brush cutter, which belched blue smoke like an obstinate dragon. Wikus recognised the young man as an occasional visitor to the deep District, received a nod and a wave which Wikus hesitantly returned.

He wanted to be angry at Sister Carrie, but he knew the pressures she was under. There was not enough money available to NGOs to do more that observe and report.

"Surely you could have found another way to bring them in."

Sister Carrie plucked out a long white box marked with a big-pharma logo and an unfamiliar trade name. "Each of these tablets cost a hundred dollars. US dollars. This is a thousand dollar box right here." She gave Wikus a look, daring him to argue. "You think a slum family could afford even one of these?"

"And where does ProForma get the money for this?"

Now a chink in her armour showed. She sat on the seat, exhausted. "I don't ask them, and they don't tell."

Wikus joined her on the rusting love seat. The afternoon sunlight filtered through the hanging leaves.

From what he had gleaned from Joel and Helen, Pro Forma people had already moved into the District. Wikus didn't know where they were staying. Joel could probably pass as a local if he kept his mouth shut and his Nikon in his bag. Helen hadn't volunteered any more information.

Now that they had gone, Wikus was restless, left worrying about Christopher.

"Are you staying in the compound tonight?" asked Sister Carrie.

"I thought I'd go into the District," he said almost too casually. _See Christopher._

"Hmm. Perhaps tomorrow would be best," she advised.

"Why is that?"

"Sunspots. Or something. They're restless tonight. I think the District can sense that Alexander's arrived."

Sister Carrie had been here for a long time, a great many years. She was hooked in the undercurrents of the million living creatures at her doorstep, perhaps even more than he was.

"I have to see him."

"You're still...?"

Fucking him? "Yes."

They were quiet. Sister Carrie stared off into a middle distance. She had encouraged their relationship, really. Initially she may have only tried to be kind, lessen the impact of that necessary xenosexual act. Wikus had been dying and in pain, after all.

When he stood up Sister Carrie blurted, "Look, Wikus dear, don't take it personally if he, ah, gives his affections to someone else tonight."

"What do you mean?" Wikus was affronted suddenly, as if Sister Carrie was trying to put him in his place.

"Days like this, the poleepkwa are polyamorous. He most likely will take another partner tonight. One or more of his own. It's instinct. He won't mean it as a slight against you, but that... compulsion is not an intellectual one"

He wanted to tell her she was wrong, but the fact was, he had never lived an entire season with them, let alone twenty years.

When he collected his belongings and headed out into the flame-tinted evening, his concerns were not helped by spotting a pair of poleepkwa rutting behind a dumpster. Even the stupid ones had a degree of secrecy when it came to sex, halfway because it was forbidden by MNU. To see them frottage so openly was an odd sight.

One of them hiss-clicked as Wikus hurried past.

Not long later, he heard the clattering of feet on loose corrugated iron. In the long shadows, Emanuel of the smoky brush cutter and the half-arsed job on the overgrowth jogged to catch up with him.

"Hey, Mr. Wikus," he singsonged flirtatiously. "M-N-U Um-lun-gu. Rhymes, huh?"

Wikus damped down the stab of annoyance. He didn't need a companion.

"You heading into the District, Mr. Wikus?"

"Yeah."

"I'll walk with you, yeah."

Well, no thank you, he wanted to say. He was safer on his own than with Emanuel. A black guy and a white guy walking together in the slums was chancing goodwill and an open invitation to get messed with.

Besides that, Emanuel was known for his rapacious appetites towards the women and the men. In any other situation, to have been sexually deviant in their society would have made Emanuel an outcast. But the guy was also rumoured to be a major black market fence on top of his almost sociopathic craziness.

All in all, the _perfect_ person to share and evening stroll with through the most dangerous slum in South Africa.

"So, what's it like? That hand? What's it feel like?"

"Just a hand," grumbled Wikus.

Emanuel looked at him, his eyes dancing. "You're the InDuna's human."

Wikus pressed his mouth together in annoyance. "I'm nobody's human."

"Ah, a free man?" Emanuel nodded, smiled up from almost-fluttering eyes.

Dear God, thought Wikus, he better not be flirting with me.

He wondered about how to turn Emanuel down politely if he got too fresh. There were some men you didn't just brush off.

Thankfully Emanuel was not in too much of a mood for romance, and they walked in silence along the deep District road. Every so often a zebra-painted technical would trundle on by, and one or two militiamen would cat-call out to Emmanuel, elicit a simpering, over effeminate reply. Wikus never felt so fluorescently pale as he did then, and try to fade into the slum shadows.

As the last rays of hot African sun, he spotted Ntozake leaning against a lone power-pole. She was wearing something inappropriate for her age again, with diamante sparkles along the too-low neckline. Some of the diamantes were missing. She couldn't fill the adult bust.

The pair of young men talking with her were both dressed in American clothes ten years out of date. They cradled non-operational poleepkwa weapons in their arms.

Ntozake grinned upon seeing him.

"Umlungu, about time you showed up."

"You shouldn't be talking to them." he snapped. The air buzzed like a high tension electrical wire. Wikus glared at Ntozake's suitors. They saw his hand and withdrew, mumbling half-hearted curses.

"Why can't I talk to my new friends? They're nice."

"That dress is too old for you." Wikus said, pulling her elbow and making her walk between him and a wry-faced Emanuel.

"You sound just like my Father did," she announced with a laugh, and then her face fell, as the rest of her brain had just realised what her teenage mouth had said. But self-pity was an emotion scorned if you lived a hard life, and she deflected with, "Big poleepkwa celebration tonight." She gave him a challenging look, and even in the fading light he could see that touch of perversity in her. "InDuna can lie with whomever he chooses tonight."

"That doesn't mean you can. Come on. You're supposed to be looking after Junior."

"But it's not dark yet"

Yet the light had already gone to that state the Bedouins used to use, when you couldn't tell the difference between a black or grey hair, that liminal twilight time. The garbage bins were already burning in advance of the night, and a noxious smoke rose from behind the shanty-huts, pillars of black in the fading day.

Emanuel looked her up and down, and Wikus was thankful it was only theatrical - she was nowhere near Emanuel's type.

"You getting you-self a man tonight, pretty lady?"

"No, she's going to bed," Wikus snapped.

"Shame," Emanuel sniffed the night air. "You can smell it tonight."

It was not just the strange night-time pheromones in the air, making him feel like this. Ntozake was wrong in one way. In love he had never had things easy, right up to the time with Tania. Like many men who have found romance difficult, who have had to struggle and fumble through ambivalent dates, and fumbled devotions that are rebuffed, from seeing objects of affection swept out from under him by better looking, nicer, more sociable men, he had developed an almost poisonous, despairing jealousy.

The thought of Christopher with someone else, with Ntozake, with anyone, was almost too much to bear.

He balled his fists in the too-tight pockets and moved on with his teeth grinding.

* * *

Slum nights were dark nights. Emanuel disappeared like a cat into the shadows. Ntozake would have gone with him if Wikus didn't keep a firm grip on her elbow.

Christopher's shack was deserted. Wikus lit the rusted lamp next to the door.

"What are we going to do now?"

"We're going to wait until Christopher comes back."

Wikus made a show of cooking Ntozake up a can of what turned out to be Mexican-flavoured beans, while he gave in to his alien urges and swallowed a can of cat food. Then he grabbed one of the stack of paperbacks Christopher was using to shore up a computer server tower, and began to read it fiercely.

Outside the warbling had increased now, that cicada trill on a summer veldt. Wikus rubbed his mouth with his prawn hand, on edge. He didn't want to go outside looking for Christopher. To go outside searching would mean that he didn't trust Christopher to come back to him. They'd worked things out, hadn't they? All their problems were behind them.

Wikus had said that he'd loved him.

If he went outside, went looking, he would have conceded to jealousy. Wikus new that game. When in competition with another man, he had never won.

"Aren't they so loud?" said Ntozake, finishing off her meal. "Are they all mating at once?"

"I don't know."

"Oh," she continued, with the triumph of one who has discovered a weakness, I'm certain he will come back tonight. But he will have his pick of the others first. Someone new yes? A nice virgin poleepkwa, of his own kind who will not give him so much grief?"

Wikus threw down the book.

"For Christ's sake's Ntozake, do you make it your life's work to make me feel bad?"

She looked down her nose at him haughtily, hard enough to do when he was taller than her.

"You think things come easy for you all the time, stupid white man? You don't know that some things aren't just yours for the taking, you have to fight for them."

"Oh? All right then. All right."

The sad brown jacket of his first days here was still slung across the back of a chair. Wikus pulled it on against the night and slammed the door on the way out.

The slum street was dark. All the activity was happening about half a kilometer away. A few desultory gunshots rang out. A group of humans cheered, urging on a fight.

It was not often the two species converged, but the poleepkwa were attracted to the fires and the warmth. As he moved closer he saw them massing in a corner, their bodies angular and even more frightful by the glow of the fire-pit, shifting nightmares giving off pheromones that thrilled and alarmed him.

He would have gone closer, but a monstrous figure stood in his way, a black and red-striped prawn, his exoskeleton so fused with blades and broken glass that every touch meant death for a human.

"Go away," the creature said.

"I have to see Christopher." Wikus tried to keep the notes of panic from his voice.

"Go away, human," the creature said again, brandishing a jagged forearm. He slapped Wikus' hand aside.

Torn up with despair, Wikus skirted the outside of the gathering, knowing that the InDuna was at the centre, that he was being courted by his own kind. Wikus was filled with a breathless anxiety. He'd come so far with Christopher, crossed moral terrains that no human should cross in loving him, and here he was again, on the outer. He should have expected this, he berated himself,. Hadn't this been the pattern existed always in his life. An object of affection surrounded by a phalanx of stronger, more popular men.

The complex smell of barbecued meat distracted him, and his stomach panged.

Not so far away someone had organized a makeshift grill over a fire, and was roasting a pig over it. Road kill or not, Wikus approached, hungry.

When they saw him, the men laughed uproariously.

"Have you been abandoned, lover?" said one fellow, easing a white trilby hat over his forehead in a manner too studied and flamboyant to be casual. He was dressed in an incongruous green suit, better suited to an American speakeasy of the 1920s than a South African slum.

Wikus stared at him. Even here he felt gauche and underdressed!

"No flavour in white meat," dead-panned an unseen voice.

The other men laughed at Wikus again, and Wikus could have been fifteen years old for all he felt, undesirable and ugly. He was about to yell something unwise, but held his tongue, for as if on cue Emanuel came out of the darkness, carrying more meat marinating in a plastic shopping bag.

"What is wrong with white meat, Amin?" he asked the unseen man. "I have not seen you turn down either when it has been offered."

More raucous laughter.

Emanuel found a hank of something still on the bone, and offered the hot, greasy jumble to Wikus, who devoured it as messily, the juices running over his chin and down his fingers.

The men went to find their entertainment with the plastic-pail drummers and the two unsteady looking prostitutes who lolled alongside them.

Emanuel watched Wikus eat, nodding in approval at this display of appetite.

"You like, huh Mr. Wikus?"

"Yes, thank-you."

The firelight was in Emanuel's eyes. They flickered in warning and promise, but Wikus was much to despondent to notice. Barely a hundred metres away the poleepkwa gathering shifted and knotted and shifted again. They were singing now, a love song to an unseen leader.

"Where is the girl?"

"In bed if she has any sense," Wikus grumbled.

Emanuel nodded sagely, as if he were a father of wild young girls rather than the one who led them astray.

Wikus pulled off his jacket and washed his face and arms in a nearby drum of rainwater.

He was about to put the jacket back on, when Emanuel said, "Don't."

Wikus paused. "It's cold."

"Not with this."

Emanuel pulled out what had seemed to be an odd bulge under his shirt, and turned out to be a bottle. When Wikus took it, the bottle was warm from Emanuel's body-heat.

"Drink with me. Good African medicine."

"More like good bathtub vodka to me."

Emanuel laughed.

The drummers were louder now. Someone had brought a cassette player with oversized speakers, all attached to a car battery. The entire contraption was only made mobile through the addition of a stolen shopping cart. Raucous American music blared from the speaker-cones.

A curious mood overtook Wikus, and he swallowed the liquid almost as an act of rebellion. The stuff burned his way into his belly, and he pulled away, coughing.

Emanuel left Wikus alone with the bottle, moving over towards where the prostitutes were dancing like a pair of kelp strands at the bottom of the ocean, and just as sentient. He joined them, coquettishly groping the buttocks a man with an M-16. A slum soldier, one of the technical drivers, came to observe the fuss. He was in no mood for romance either, slapped Emanuel away - not hard - but enough to mean business.

There was enough firelight, enough shifts in the lanky poleepkwa shadows to see who they gave obeisance to. Their InDuna, Christopher. They would never have so openly acknowledged him, but tonight the District was unforgiving, there were no strangers or traitors. For MNU to have come here would have been suicidal.

Wikus stood up, unsteady, still trying to catch a glimpse of Christopher. Sour jealousy was already fermenting in his stomach. The air was raw and alive, human and alien emotions running hot. Not so far away the same slum soldier shot a man dead as casually as if he had said hello. Inquisitive heads tipped up towards the shot, but there was no panic, no condemnation. They were all hooked into the same strange and violent channel.

Before he could move over towards the poleepkwa encampment, Emanuel's cool, thin fingers seized his arm.

"They'll kill you."

"I have to see him."

There. He'd blurted it out. If it had only been a rumour before, a malicious story made up by the locals who saw this mutant white man living so close to the poleepkwa, now it was fact. Emanuel goggled for a moment at Wikus, then settled into a languid, knowing smile.

"Why don't you stay here," the smile grew broad, inviting. "Stay. Have fun with your own kind."

There were two Emanuels now, and Wikus found the young man taking his hips in strong callused hands, leaning into Wikus' own unsteady weight. No face-to-face intimacy though. Emanuel assumed the stance of the aggressor, sliding behind Wikus as fluidly as water across stone. Hard hands holding him close. He was aware of the warmth behind him of another body, was startled a little that it was not hard like Christopher's, did not occupy the same space.

The music had swelled in his senses now. More had been in that drink than mere bathtub alcohol. Wikus thought stupidly of black magic and all those colonial fairytales. Emanuel was murmuring in his ear.

"How far gone are you? What parts of you have changed?"

Emanuel stroked the length of Wikus' monstrous arm, sliding over his shoulder and the section of his back almost entirely given over to the Change. Even with the barrier of this cotton Wikus shivered. A human touch.

Emanuel laughed at Wikus' response, rocked his pelvis into Wikus' behind and there was no hiding the burgeoning erection, Emanuel's arousal. The music took on space and form, surrounded him like a heartbeat.

"What else has changed? What else?"

Emanuel's hand slid over his crotch, squeezed him even though he was still soft. Wikus barely felt him. His attention was on the aliens, the glimpses of Christopher, glimpses of creature's posturing themselves before him.

_I've been so alone. _

Wikus stared at the rites, grinding his teeth in agitation. Did it mean nothing, all the time they'd been together, all the times Christopher had offered affection and had been rebuffed by stupid, stupid Wikus?

And then Wikus had confessed to love and it was over, over.

A young prawn in final molt dropped to his knees, and there was no mistaking the sexual displays of the spread legs, the silvery sheen oozing from the groin.

Christopher had been with others of his kind. Christopher knew that they could give him what Wikus could notn

Burning up with jealousy, Wikus responded to the press of Emanuel's hand, allow Emanuel to pull up his t-shirt and discard it, so his pale body was exposed to the firelight. Emanuel made an appreciative sound, hands palming both the exoskeletal patches and the soft hair on Wikus' chest.

A furious desire began to slow burn through Wikus, an exquisite sickness.

Through the drugged haze Wikus could see Christopher now, glaring through the crowd and at him with murderous indignation, and Wikus stared back, equally challenging. The old Boer obstinacy rose in him. Wikus writhed under Emanuel's touches, wanted to taunt Christopher with this indiscretion.

There was no escaping Christopher's attention, and he moved his body in the shifting, intimate firelight, the awareness of being watched and wanted as exciting as a touch.

Emanuel laughed in Wikus' ear. "Ah, he looks at me now, the Prawn InDuna. He wishes to kill me for touching his property."

"I'm not his property," growled Wikus, throwing his arms behind his head so the movement made his exoskeletal patches ache against each other, a terrible and erotic sensation, a perversion like nothing other, wanted Christopher to look, wanted him to know this.

"He should know better," said Emanuel. "Human flesh is forbidden to them. He will have his own kind tonight, as will you."

Their eyes met. Wikus saw lust sparkling in Emanuel's hooded eyes. They had so much more in common than Wikus and Christopher, a billion years of shared evolution and DNA. Emanuel took Wikus' wrist, began to lead him off towards the row of abandoned huts, slumped in the near-dark..

The action was enough. Christopher rose to his full height and abandoned his people, crossed the dividing line between human and alien.

"Wikus," grated Christopher in threat, the only word in human he could speak.

Rifles were shouldered. Prawns and humans stayed apart, and there was no mistaking the threat in Christopher.

"Ah-" murmured Emanuel, dropping Wikus' wrist and conceding defeat. No human could stand up to a poleepkwa in rage.

"I told you to stay in the Compound," Christopher clicked harshly. "I told you to _wait_."

"You told me no such thing," Wikus hissed back, the intoxicant and days of thwarted sexual arousal reaching their peak. "You only said you would be back soon."

Christopher stepped forward, made a buzz-saw sound at Emanuel. The young man held up his hands.

The humans who had been ready to shoot Christopher now began to look at each other uneasily, A simple domestic argument would have been entertainment, here was something morally atrocious. Hardened warriors suddenly took an interest in their games and conversations.

"You should have told me," demanded Wikus. "Should have told me you were doing to have activities with your fooking-" paused, not knowing the word for a hermaphrodite that covered _whores_ and _sluts_.

But Christopher was refusing to be contrite. "You make me suffer! You make me hurt, waiting for you, needing and not having!" Christopher said, spitting out the click-syllables like gunshots. "My blood is poison, wanting and not having, all the time!"

"But I told you, this morning! I told you!"

"You give and take away!"

The alien had never been so honest with him, had never allowed Wikus so much information, all at once.

Wikus fell to his knees as Christopher towered over him, mouthparts writing furiously, frustration making him shake. "InDuna," Wikus said, parodying the creatures who had knelt before Christopher, offering themselves to him.

Christopher stared at him, before some unfamiliar words. He snatched up Wikus by his arm.

"_You mock me?"_

"Give me a fooking chance, Christopher."

Christopher began to yank him away from the human firelight, propelled him towards a shack fresh-painted with language-glyphs. Wikus stumbled along, trying to keep his feet on the ground.

The glass and metal poleepkwa sidled up to Christopher, growled something that Wikus could only catch in snatches: "Human" and "forbidden."

Christopher swore and shoved the interferer aside. Wikus found himself pushed into the shack, the door shut and bolted.

Even through the fug of intoxication Wikus stared at the surroundings. The shack had been cleared out of everything recognizable as human-made. Clean white sand had been spread out at least a foot deep. Small flares lit the rim. It was tropical hot, the sand warmer than blood.

Christopher let him go. Wikus looked around. It dawned on him with a lurch of nausea, he reason for this place. An alien world recreated in miniature, the hot desert world of Christopher's home recreated here. They had meant for Christopher to fuck one of his own kind here. Meant it, while Wikus was waiting and pining back at the Compound.

With wary eyes, Christopher watched him.

"So now you know."

"Fook you." Wikus said, old hurts rising up. Old memories, of women he had thought were his, turning up on the arm of another man. All those moments, slicing him open, laying him bare.

"You have a mate too, who you will go back to once you are... cured. I am merely a placeholder."

"Fook you!" Wikus balled his fists, in a mood for violence now, to hit and hurt.

Christopher approached him. Wikus threw a feeble punch human hand that Christopher only caught in his own.

"You don't have to stay. We've collected nearly enough fluid. It won't be long now before you can go home."

Wikus said again, broken, "Fook you, fook you, fook you creature..."

Christopher was reverently quiet, tickling like an engine winding down, breath held. His hands were gentle on Wikus' skin and Wikus still murmured curses between sobs, fortifications destroyed, defenseless and afraid, afraid both of Christopher staying and Christopher leaving and Wikus wanted him so badly it was a pain like no other.

Sobbing, he sunk to the sand, pulling Christopher with him and he wanted to give Christopher what Christopher so badly wanted, yanked open the button-fly of his jeans, tried to struggle out of the constricting denim, only to have it snag at catch at the ankles.

Too much of a hurry to wriggle free, Wikus let his knees fall apart anyway and his own alien necessity was in the air, a thick scent he could taste, savage and repellant and exciting all at the same time. "Ah fook, now, now."

Did he have to ask? Christopher's damp, urgent mouth was all over Wikus, sliding and tickling between his neck and chest, inking out damp trails of desire and worship. Then the mouth dropped lower, over the swell of the human parts, tasting his arousal, his sex. The complex mouth flowered upon the delicate, sensitive opening, and Wikus gasped. The nerves of his pelvis, his centre of sexual desire had moved there, and Christopher found the place by instinct.

For all that Wikus felt, for all that he loved Christopher, the sight and sensation was almost too much to take in all at once. The that inhuman face between his legs, the roil of mouthparts over his pale belly, the tentacles twisting in the dark fur of his pubic hair, overwhelming.

His human conditioning was so strong, he had to close his eyes and look aside, collect himself.

Christopher took the reaction the wrong way. A flare of indignant anger, that after all this time Wikus still treated him with revulsion. The mood changed, soft hands became hard, trapping Wikus' wrists to the sand. Christopher squatted between Wikus' denim-trapped legs, the way prawns did when they coupled, stabbed into him in insolence and anger, his thing still chitinous and rough.

Harsh susurration of stolen pleasure, eyes screwed shut, damp tendrils flicking spit and Christopher gorged on the forbidden human body, fucked it, took what he craved.

Wikus sobbed with Christopher's sharp entry, didn't know why. It was more than pain, more than Christopher mounting him too early, so impersonally, and for little more than relief. This thing that Wikus hated and needed. This thing that Christopher was too weak to resist.

The hot sand rasped at Wikus' back, sloughing off the dead skin.

They were in a battle now - each trying to prove one thing to the other. Wikus sucked at the air, would have either screamed or orgasmed then and there if he'd not restrained himself, did what he did. His new muscles clenched in readiness, his stomach fluttered, but it was Christopher who made shrill, desperate sounds, his gills sucking in great gouts of air, his flanks sweating slick and secondary limbs drawn up, tight and trembling.

Christopher's eyes opened into unfocused slits as all his will went into the sexual act, his mouthparts flecking bitter salt. Their eyes locked at last. Christopher's organ swelled, his thrusts became short and tight, the poison dart flicking out each time he went deep. Wikus moaned Christopher's name, if only to fill his own mouth with words and not cries. More frightening than the change in him physically was this yearning need for this creature, in him and over him. He pulled free of the restraining grip, clung to Christopher's narrow waist, gave himself the illusion of control, heard the dull thump of Christopher's pelvis slapping into the back of his thighs, wondered if bruises would be left, was caught by the sound of the raucous human music, that incessant drumming.

Wikus stiffened, arched his back. His body was not his own. Black pearl spilt across his stomach, evidence of his own orgasm, and he was so transported he could barely put image and sensation together.

Christopher froze, his pelvis jerking as if in spasm, then the feeling of being consumed by starsparks, that hot whatever-the-fuck, and Wikus had missed that feeling so much he took Christopher like an addict takes a hit, takes and overdoses, crashes and burns.

"Oh God, oh fooking Jesus..."

Hot alien hands gripping his shoulders hard, Christopher's cricket-call in his ear like an entreaty, Christopher's exoskeleton leaking at the seams from the brutal pleasure-response of his own body.

Christopher was not yet saited. He darted his roughening organ into Wikus and brought himself to climax once more. Wikus shuddered, and Christopher pulled out with a buzz-saw grunt, bringing a layer of raw skin with him. He collapsed beside Wikus, gills flaring.

Still panting with exhaustion, Wikus reached out to stroke the soft skin under Christopher's eye. There was not the language in him to articulate what he felt right now. He was vaguely aware of the door opening, food and water being delivered. Something half-raw, pilfered from the humans' barbecue.

"I'll get," he said, and stood up on shaky knees. Christopher caught him before he could fall over. The slime of their intercourse stained his thighs. Christopher clicked in consternation.

"Ach, you're bleeding."

Wikus looked down where they had lain. There was only the vague sense of colour information in the low light, but he could smell the iron in the blood. Not so much though.

"I hadn't realised. I'm still numb down there," Wikus said, feeling bashful and shy in a post-coitus that didn't involve silences or one of them leaving.

Christopher squeezed his eyes shut, his brow-plates furrowing, his gesture of self-criticism. "I was too rough with you. I didn't think. I was concerned only with my own pleasure." His fist punched the sand.

"But it was good." Wikus reached for Christopher, stroking the damp folds of his neck. "It was."

"It was wrong of me to hurt you just so that I could..." Evasive eyes. Wrong, but Christopher had wanted it. Wanted that act in mindless desire and gratification. Wikus wondered if an alien could dream and long for sex the way a human could, if Christopher had imagined taking him in fierce desire, not just as a medical aid.

"You weren't to have known." Wikus was at a loss at how to convince Christopher. If it had been a human, he would have kissed the doubt from him. Wikus mouthed under the fronds of Christopher's labrum instead, to one of the lower mouthparts, smooth mucus membranes, hard bone, his tongue and lips moving though the salty complexity. Arousal was stirring in his belly. His kisses became urgent. "Ah Christopher, I liked it, I liked it a lot. I want you again like that, I don't care."

Wikus sat back on his haunches, his bruised cloaca throbbing in a fierce beat. He spread his knees so that Christopher could see, stroked himself there with his prawn hand. A distant pain lurked on the edges, but he was still drunk from African aphrodisiac and prawn poison.

"But you might want another." His low voice surprised him. He did not know seduction, only pleading.

"Wikus, I don't want to hurt you."

"Touch me then, just touch me, just a little, eh?."

Christopher stared, both at the hand at the wet welcome of that new opening, bright and flushed from fucking, at Wikus' face. Wikus thought about every dirty movie he had ever seen, where loose women squirmed with false licentiousness, and never understood it until now, this glorious experience of being looked upon and desired to the point of lost control, to have another living thing want him so much that he was the powerful one.

Christopher surrendered, snatched him up, slid his hand between Wikus' legs, held him open. Everything was so new, the position, the emotion, the fragile moment. Just like on the very first time, Wikus helped him find the right place, his fingers brushing over the meat of Christopher's organ, holding him steady as he guided Christopher home.

Christopher's head tossed back in silent triumph as he sheathed himself into Wikus. And Wikus clung, rolled his hips clumsily, let him lose himself in that perfect poison. Despite his numb core he could feel each rivulet of sweat coursing down his bare skin, the contraction of his thighs, the pulse of Christopher's lovemaking, rough alien hands in the small of his back...

Then it was over.

Wikus wondered where his body had gone. Cast away somewhere, torn off like a rag of flesh he no longer needed. Christopher laid him down on the sand, gentle again.

There was a gap in the roof. The lamps had burned low. Wikus could see a scatter of stars through it.

"One of those your planet, hey?" Wikus drawled, a drunken joy leaping through him.

"No," said Christopher.

"But it's nice to think of though. I always used to think it when I was little, that there was something up there, looking down. Maybe you, eh?"

"Maybe," said Christopher and then he lay next to Wikus. "Things will be different in the morning."

"They won't be." Wikus wanted to put all his intensity in the words, but they came out a murmur. Comedowns, fading endorphins and the aftermath of sex made him weary.

One by one the lamps extinguished, and he let the hot sand embrace him, fell asleep to the deep ocean sound of Christopher's breath.

.

.

* * *

_[To be continued...]_


End file.
